Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, its casualties have disproportionately been made up of minorities from across the Russian Federation, among them Buryats, Dagestanis, Kalmyks, and Tyvans. These minority groups, often from poor and remote parts of the country, make up an inordinate amount of Russia’s army, and as anthropologist Gillian Tett described, are being used as “cannon fodder” on the front lines. Though the Russian Federation has only officially confirmed several hundred deaths in its armed forces, many experts consider the figure to have now run into the thousands.

It is difficult to get exact figures for the number of casualties from the conflict, but independent Russian media outlets Mediazona and iStories have calculated that Dagestan and Buryatia have the highest death tolls of any Russian region, even though their populations are several times smaller than those of Russia’s wealthy and predominantly Slav regions. Young, well-off men from St. Petersburg and Moscow can dodge the draft and take up jobs far away from the front lines, but less fortunate individuals from poverty-stricken regions like Dagestan are forced to take up the only steady income available to them. Often, these jobs are right at the heart of the violence.

If the economic coercion wasn’t bad enough, there are now several reported cases of the Russian Army using positive blackmail, where soldiers are offered clean criminal records or cash bonuses upon completion of their tour of service, to target young men from poor regions.

These underhanded recruitment tactics are a sign of Russia’s increasing desperation to scrape up enough manpower for its war, but they aren’t being used blindly; rather, they are bloody examples of the white Slav supremacy which permeates Russian society. Russia’s leading rental site allowed landlords to select an option for “Slavs only” as recently as last year. For centuries, the people of Russia’s roughly 160 ethnic minorities have been subjugated, mistreated, and continually decried as inferior. Their deaths on the front line are a testament to how cheaply Moscow views the lives of its ethnic minorities.

There has been some degree of unrest within Russia at the human cost, especially for minorities, of Putin’s latest war. The most vocal of this has come from a group called the Free Buryatia Foundation, which encourages ethnic Russians, primarily Buryats, to withdraw from the Ukrainian conflict by offering free legal support and transport. To date, the organization claims that it has supported over 150 Buryats, Kalmyks, and Dagestanis to depart from Ukraine and return to their homelands.

“We know we can’t influence Vladimir Putin directly, but the less cannon fodder he has at his disposal, the sooner this war will end,” said the Foundation’s Victoria Maladaeva: a sentiment echoed by the many Russian activists who are tired of fighting Putin’s war while so many of their own are suffering at the hands of Russia’s imperialist and colonialist past.

Despite the growing discontent, however, groups like the Free Buryatia Foundation are small and very limited in what they can achieve. The intense censorship and dire consequences for dissent related to the conflict mean that expanding these groups inside Russia is near impossible, and so long as fighting in the conflict offers some reprieve from poverty, opposition to military service is not necessarily supported by the minorities themselves.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has ostracized almost all of its neighbours, and by throwing its ethnic population at the front lines, it continues to ostracize its own people. This war has sown divisions that will take decades, if not centuries, to heal, and the longer the conflict persists, the worse for all involved. Russia must immediately cease its policy of violence, exploitation, and racist supremacy and re-engage with the beauty and diversity inherent in its vast, multi-ethnic borders.