From Foreign Policy, November 17:
“Black widows” marrying soldiers to collect death benefits are symptomatic of society-wide rot.
In October 2023, Sergey Khandozhko, a 40-year-old Russian man from a small village in Bryansk oblast, married Elena Sokolova, an employee at a military enlistment office in a neighboring village. The very next day, Khandozhko signed up to fight in Ukraine, despite having zero military experience, and was killed at the front four months later. A few days after his funeral, Sokolova claimed widow’s benefits amounting to at least 3 million rubles (around $37,000), even though she never shared a household with her late husband or had her marital status changed in her passport. Khandozhko’s brother, Aleksandr, successfully disputed the marriage in court, which ruled that Sokolova had entered a fictitious marriage “to obtain potential financial benefits in the event of the husband’s injury or death.” Aleksandr also claimed that Sokolova abused her authority at the draft office to expedite the process of getting Sergey into military service, did not visit him when he lay injured in a hospital, and was living with another man.
Sokolova is, by all appearances, a “black widow”—a newly emerged slang term for women who ingratiate themselves with unmarried soldiers, especially those returning from the front for a rare leave of absence. After quickly marrying the soldiers, black widows see them off to the front line, where they are very likely to be killed in action, given Russia’s macabre tactics of sending expendable human waves into the “meat grinder,” as Russians call the front in Ukraine. When this happens, black widows cash in the grobovye—which roughly translates as “coffin money,” the common code for government payouts to the families of fallen soldiers. The sums can go as high as 13 million rubles (around $160,000), which represents generational wealth in poor regions where salaries hover around 30,000 to 40,000 rubles a month. Lonely, marginalized men like Khandozhko are ideal targets, because their widows won’t have to share the grobovye with other family members.
While it’s impossible to know the scale of the phenomenon, Khandozhko is not an isolated case. There are dozens of similar reports, sometimes including court cases, from various regions: Ulyanovsk, Ryazan, Samara, Saratov, and Russia’s Pacific coast. In Tomsk, a real estate agent was sentenced to community service for advising clients to marry a soldier from the “special military operation” to make the down payment on a property. Such motivations can easily be put into action on social media, where groups such as “We don’t abandon our own! Date a soldier” on Vkontakte with tens of thousands of subscribers facilitate connections between soldiers and civilian women....
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