HYPE ON BLOOD: How Russia’s “black widows” trade husbands for money

Añadido: 2026-05-05

[00:00:10]family values Russian style. Send your husband off to the recruitment office >> and then they'll get him killed over there and live off the death payment as if nothing happened. He died so he died. Instead of loving wives, black widows.

[00:00:30]>> You find a man who is serving in the special military operation. He gets killed and you collect 8 million.

[00:00:38]>> The state calls on women to have children because the country is running out of soldiers.

[00:00:44]>> Seven children, eight children, even more.

[00:00:47]>> Women are being told that their purpose is children, kitchen, and church.

[00:00:52]>> We need more people. The population problem is real.

[00:00:58]What has happened to the institution of family in Russia since the start of the war against Ukraine? Watch in this special report. Love to the grave. How the war has corrupted family values in Russia.

[00:01:15]Family, an ideological symbol hiding nothing but emptiness behind its facade.

[00:01:21]In Russia, it has been elevated to something almost sacred and turned into a powerful tool of manipulation by those in power. But Russia's war against Ukraine has revealed what traditional family values in Russia actually look like beneath the surface.

[00:01:38]>> Russia was and remains a bastion of traditional values.

[00:01:41]>> Such a shame mine didn't go. They didn't kill him. I could have made some money.

[00:01:45]There is a case of a woman who married three servicemen, one after another, each of whom was killed in turn, and each time she collected the death payment.

[00:01:55]>> Over four years of war against Ukraine, this practice has spread across Russia.

[00:02:01]This is 30-year-old Bronis Lava from the settlement of Nova Musvah. She had been married for 13 years. To pay off their debts, she convinced her husband to go to war. It was the act of a real man. A decent, law-abiding man, not a coward.

[00:02:17]>> She also had two children to raise, the woman explains. But her husband never came home. He was killed during yet another meat grinder assault.

[00:02:27]Well, who knew? I thought this war would be over quickly, and he didn't expect to end up in that kind of slaughter either.

[00:02:34]>> More than a year has passed since that day. Bronnislava's husband has been formally declared dead, but his body has never been returned. No funeral means no death certificate, and no death certificate means no state payment. It hasn't been as straightforward as I'd hoped. I've run into enormous bureaucracy. Since the moment of his death, I still cannot obtain the death certificate. I hope they will bring the body to Moscow. The only thing on this widow's mind is the death payment. She makes no effort to hide the fact that she is not grieved for her husband.

[00:03:08]>> When I get a moment to myself, I go to karaoke. For many Russian widows, the death of what was supposedly a loved one has been reduced to a bureaucratic formality.

[00:03:20]This woman boasts on camera about how well she has arranged things for herself.

[00:03:25]He goes off to the operation. I register the children under his name, collect a one-off payment of around 5 million. Then I get a monthly payment on top around 2 to 300,000.

[00:03:39]Plus, just think about all the other benefits, kindergarten subsidies, school subsidies, and she is counting on the jackpot, too, the death payment.

[00:03:53]>> And then they'll get him killed over there.

[00:03:56]Some try to squeeze additional income from the death of the bread winner by monetizing performative grief videos on social media, squeezing out tears on camera.

[00:04:07]I don't want anything in this life without him.

[00:04:10]>> The videos where I cry always get the most views.

[00:04:14]People respond to it.

[00:04:16]>> In Russia, participants in the so-called special military operation are now in high demand. Many women are quite literally hunting for them. Specialist coaches have even appeared, offering to teach women how to quickly make a soldier fall for them and get him to the altar.

[00:04:32]>> If I want an apartment, where am I supposed to get the money?

[00:04:34]>> How to earn enough for an apartment through the scheme? Explained by a state agent Marina Orlova in an interview. You find a man who is currently serving in the special military operation. He gets killed and you collect 8 million. A lot of women are doing this now. A great many come to us with those 8 million.

[00:04:51]They buy some cheap little apartment.

[00:04:53]It's a real working scheme. It's a business plan. This is undeniably a business. Because where there is serious money, the category of morality tends to disappear. As we know, coaches have emerged, lawyers who lay it all out carefully and explain exactly how to do it to maximize the payout, which once again confirms that in terms of moral and ethical standards, Russia is a country in a state of complete and total degradation. Russian social media is full of groups for meeting participants in the special military operation.

[00:05:26]Dedicated bots have even appeared on Telegram. On specialist websites, there are hundreds of women's profiles, all seeking to establish relationships with Russian soldiers as quickly as possible.

[00:05:38]Looking for my soldier boy? Cena, 28.

[00:05:42]Kind and smart. I love flowers and sushi. Looking for my soldier boy.

[00:05:47]Ingga, 32.

[00:05:50]love, family, children. For many women in Russia, since the start of the war against Ukraine, genuine romantic feeling has simply lost its appeal. What inspires them instead is the death payment, money, compensation for a soldier's death. For Russian women who have spent their entire lives in poverty, these sums seem enormous. The amounts the state promises are equivalent to what an ordinary Russian might earn over several years, sometimes decades.

[00:06:20]This windfall money operates as a form of social stratification in provincial Russia. If you imagine what daily life looks like in the depths of the country, what can a woman there actually earn?

[00:06:32]These wives are genuinely often relieved that their husbands have been killed and are quite prepared to follow the same logic again to find a new husband willing to go and fight. There are also serial widows, women who have managed to marry not one, not even two, but multiple Russian soldiers. These widows deceive one man into marrying them, then a second, then a third. You might think that after the estate agents, the soldier hunting profiles, and the black widows, there is nothing left to be surprised by. But the reality is even darker. Two female employees of a military unit and a warrant officer from the 60th motorized rifle brigade were arrested. The women had been marrying servicemen while the warrant officer, the very person whose job it is to look after the personnel under his command, was sending their husbands into combat situations that amounted to certain death. The three of them then calmly divided up the funeral payments between themselves.

[00:07:31]In Russia, family values are held up by propaganda and the state as the highest of ideals. And yet, even children are being taught that the death of a loved one is an opportunity to make good money. Some girls are now drawing up what amount to investment plans.

[00:07:47]>> Mom, you know what? I'll find myself a boyfriend who goes off to the operation.

[00:07:55]>> He'll die.

[00:07:58]He'll die. And I'll get the money.

[00:08:00]From an early age, a social attitude is being formed. Family means nothing.

[00:08:05]Money means everything.

[00:08:08]>> When children receive this injection of cynicism at an early age, it never leaves them. Do you know what the ideology of the Russian state is today?

[00:08:18]It is state necroilia.

[00:08:20]They do not even try to hide it. They say it openly at conferences. Sometimes it is no longer even a cult of death.

[00:08:29]Children are being taught how easy it is to die >> and how much money that death can bring.

[00:08:36]>> And here is another story that of Kenya Abramova from Kranadar region. Her husband was sent to the front. Despite being unfit for service on medical grounds, the young woman began fighting to bring her husband home. Her mother-in-law sees things very differently.

[00:08:52]>> She says, "Well, he's better off there.

[00:08:54]He won't be drinking and the pay is good." And this is his mother saying this. We've all heard that saying, haven't we? That only a mother's love is unconditional. That wives can betray you, leave you. But a mother can say something like that.

[00:09:10]This is a diagnosis of Russian society.

[00:09:13]There is nothing more disturbing than a wife or worse a mother who actively wants her husband or son to go and kill.

[00:09:22]That is bad enough in itself, but to also want him to be prepared to die so the family can collect a large payout.

[00:09:29]What could be worse than that? This is not simply the destruction of traditional values. It is the complete destruction of the moral fabric of society itself.

[00:09:40]And it is not uncommon if an adult son tries to avoid mobilization, his mother will send him to the front regardless of his wishes. Mother turned in her mobilized son twice after he fled the front.

[00:09:54]A serviceman from the Chalabinsk region was sentenced to 7 years in prison for unauthorized abandonment of his unit.

[00:10:02]When a soldier is killed, his family often squanders the death payment without a second thought. Even the Russian authorities have acknowledged that this problem is growing. And many women send their husbands to war for reasons beyond money alone.

[00:10:19]Beyond self-p protection, there is uh clearly also a motive of disposal at work here.

[00:10:26]What use is this creature in trousers who lies on the sofa, drinks, and beats you? But if you send him off to the front, you can get a fairly substantial return on him.

[00:10:40]Family values are degrading as a presenter on a propaganda channel complains that her husband, a veteran of the operation, raises his hand against her.

[00:10:49]>> So, if you're a hero out there, I'm supposed to bow down to you while you mistreat me and my child?

[00:10:53]>> Yes. Because I went out there to give my life for my country, and you say you'll leave me? Unbelievable. That question should never even be asked.

[00:10:59]>> So, I'm supposed to tolerate being hit, being treated without any respect? Yes.

[00:11:04]>> Tolerate it. At this point, the distance to the Taliban, with whom the Kremlin has cultivated relations, is not so great. In Afghanistan, after the Taliban came to power, the state officially permitted husbands to beat their wives and children. In Russia, the situation is not all that different. There is no domestic violence prevention legislation, and members of the state Duma argue that such a law would destroy families. The argument goes that conflicts should be resolved without airing them in public. And if a husband hits you, it means he loves you. Police frequently prefer not to get involved.

[00:11:40]And the phrase, "Come back when he's killed you," has long since stopped being a dark joke and become a lived reality. All of this is happening in a country that talks endlessly about the cult of family. Television screens are filled with constant talk of tradition, loyalty, and spiritual foundations.

[00:11:59]It is important that the family is once again taking on a profound moral significance in Russian society.

[00:12:06]>> Russian women are being called on to have more children for the future of the country. It is vital that the number of large families continues to grow.

[00:12:15]>> In practice, millions of women are raising children alone. Their husbands have been mobilized or killed at war.

[00:12:22]Yet this has not stopped the authorities from pompously declaring the launch of the year of the family. I found it quite amusing that the president declared 2024 the year of the family. I wanted to say the year of the broken family perhaps.

[00:12:36]Why the year of the family when I have no husband? It feels like some kind of mockery of us.

[00:12:43]The family as the cornerstone of society is also championed by representatives of the church. The family is a school of love. Every human skill, communication, love, compassion, mutual support, solidarity, all of it is formed within the family.

[00:13:01]And propagandists go even further, calling for a return to the old patriarchal order.

[00:13:07]One must live in accordance with the spirit of the doastro, and that spirit can be expressed in a kind of holy trinity, God, Russia, and family.

[00:13:19]Putin's United Russia Party offers women a similar model of existence. Children, kitchen, church. The Russian authorities speak endlessly about morality. Yet, they themselves are frequently deeply immoral.

[00:13:33]>> When the most senior figures openly spit on the very traditional values they preach, people understand perfectly well that it is all just words and that there is no reality behind any of it.

[00:13:45]Putin's own personal life, for example, is hardly a model to follow.

[00:13:51]What is happening with Putin's family?

[00:13:54]He divorced his wife. He refers to his daughters as those women and they do not carry his surname.

[00:14:01]It is widely rumored and practically accepted as established fact that he lives in an unregistered relationship with Alina Kabaya, with whom he reportedly has children who also do not carry his surname. And how does any of that relate to traditional values? It does not. Not in the slightest.

[00:14:20]>> The same behavior is characteristic of the entire so-called political elite of the Russian Federation.

[00:14:27]In reality, it is a total cesspool.

[00:14:30]Everyone knows perfectly well that what goes on there would make Epstein look tame by comparison.

[00:14:36]But they feed the masses moral values, patriotism. They cross themselves, go to church, make sure to be seen holding a candle.

[00:14:46]>> When it comes to the Russian elite, despite having declared the LGBT community an extremist organization, there are a great many people within it of non-traditional sexual orientation.

[00:14:58]So, the entire construction is an absolute lie. and the attitude toward family clearly does not apply to the elite itself which maintains an enormous number of wives, mistresses, and so forth. This is a war criminal who organized the abduction and illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for her arrest.

[00:15:21]Russian authorities and propagandists call her a guardian of family values, but her own conduct bears little resemblance to the spiritual ideals she claims to uphold.

[00:15:32]Maria Lavova Bova, Russia's children's ombbudswoman and a vocal defender of traditional values, appears to have entered into a relationship with the Russian Orthodox oligarch Constantine Malof. She has 10 children, five biological and five adopted. She was married to a priest. She divorced him and left for the oligarch, all while speaking on camera about protecting traditional values. And if you will allow me, I would like to continue this work. This is how it is behind the pious words and carefully crafted images of Putin's Russia's pseudo elite. Human life has ceased to matter. The state sends other people's sons, husbands, brothers into the grinder of war and pays their families generously for their silence, buying their tolerance of a criminal regime.

[00:16:19]As long as it serves our interests, anything can be done if it benefits us.

[00:16:24]>> I want to thank United Russia for the gifts, for the lovely bouquet of flowers, and for the meat grinder, which I can actually put to good use. Some people live or barely live. It's hard to say. They drift away from drinking or something else.

[00:16:44]They go, and whether they lived at all is barely noticeable.

[00:16:50]The man either lived >> or he didn't. But your son lived.

[00:16:55]>> Do you understand? And his purpose was fulfilled. That means his life was not lived in vain.

[00:17:04]>> The celebrated building block of society with its warped model has nothing in common with the principles on which family is built in developed democratic countries. There family is about respect for the individual, for their rights, and for their life. In Russia, it has become a barter arrangement in which a loved one is quite literally sold to the regime. Cynicism and double standards, lies, and the corruption of meaning, hollow pseudo values behind which there is nothing but empty rhetoric. These have become the foundation of a criminal regime. One that has brought the institution of family in Russia to its final and complete degradation. Yanav special report.