The Number Of People With Disabilities In Russia Jumped To A 17-year High

The war with Ukraine brought Russia an "army of invalids" the size of the population of Pskov or Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.

Following record losses since World War II, which Western intelligence estimates at hundreds of thousands of people, the war with Ukraine has brought Russia an "army of disabled people" the size of the population of Pskov or Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, reports The Moscow Times.

The total number of disabled people in the country increased by 190,000 in 2023-24, according to data from the Social Fund of Russia published in Rosstat's Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System (EMISS).

At the end of last year, there were 11.122 million disabled people in the country, compared to 11.04 million a year earlier and 10.932 million in 2022. The rate of increase in the number of disabled people has become a record since 2007: then there were more than 470 thousand people at once, according to EMISS data.

Before the war for almost 10 years the number of disabled people in Russia has been declining: 13.209 million people in 2011, 12.75 million - in 2016, 11.87 million - in 2020. In 2022, for the first time in 18 years, less than 11 million disabled people were registered in the Social Fund system, after which their number increased for two years in a row, which statistics have not recorded since 2010-11.

At the end of 2024, 376,000 Russians were severely wounded and disabled at the front, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimated earlier. The total losses of the Russian army for 2022-24, according to IISS calculations, amounted to 783 thousand people. Of these, 172 thousand were killed and 611 thousand were wounded. Among the wounded, 235,000 were qualified as curable, while the rest were crippled, IISS experts pointed out.

One in two of the seriously wounded faced amputation, a senior Russian official familiar with the statistics told The New York Times earlier. As a result, the need for prostheses at the expense of the state in Russia has tripled: the 2026 budget allocates 98.16 billion rubles for the purchase of "provision of disabled people with technical means of rehabilitation" against 33 billion rubles in pre-war 2021.

Budget expenditures for prostheses grow every year of the war: 37.2 billion rubles in 2022, 42.2 billion rubles - in 2023, 55.8 billion rubles - in 2024, 75.4 billion rubles - in 2025.

The sharp increase in the number of Russians left without arms and legs is due to the consequences of the war, pointed out earlier member of the Russian Guild of Prosthetists-Orthopedists Timur Grishin: "There is naturally a huge flow of traumatized people who need prosthetics and all the technical means of rehabilitation. And the number of ordinary disabled people has not grown. Unfortunately, they are now being given far less rehabilitation equipment.

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