Putin Promised a “Time of Heroes.” The Kremlin is Giving Them the Cold Shoulder Instead

Ahead of the 2026 State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament) elections — the first since the launch of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — the Russian authorities are wrestling with a dilemma: they need to usher war veterans into parliament without letting them coalesce into a genuine political force.

Since the invasion began, the Kremlin has spent years cultivating the image of a new elite, signaling that veterans of the “SMO” (Special Military Operation, the official Russian government term for the war in Ukraine) should take their rightful place alongside established technocrats and old-guard politicians.

Vladimir Putin has repeatedly hammered this theme, dubbing the military “the real elite” and emphasizing that they are the ones who should “rise to leading positions in the state.” To institutionalize this idea, the government launched the “Time of Heroes” program — a state-sponsored career elevator designed to fast-track yesterday’s soldiers into government posts.

The 2026 elections were supposed to mark another major milestone for this initiative, but even in the early preparatory stages, a stark reality emerged: integrating the military into the political system en masse simply will not work. This is not merely about electoral risks (will voters actually back SMO veterans?), but about the fact that the political system itself has no idea what to do with them.

As early as November 2025, according to IStories’ sources within the Kremlin and the State Duma, officials discussed a plan to usher up to 150 war participants into parliament — nearly a third of the entire chamber. However, that ambitious idea was swiftly scrapped. Insiders explained it bluntly: “You can’t bring these people in like that; they’re completely non-systemic.” Consequently, the target was slashed to 50–70 individuals. Now, sources’ estimates have grown even more cautious: the working figure is roughly 30 deputies, despite public declarations from United Russia (the ruling pro-Putin political party) about its desire to seat over 40 veterans in the Duma.

The prospect of a new bloc of military deputies clearly makes the Kremlin uneasy. Currently, the presidential administration and United Russia are debating exactly how to absorb veterans into the next Duma: should they create dedicated structures for them, or, conversely, disperse them across various committees to dilute their influence and ensure safety? Judging by the guarded commentary from pro-Kremlin political experts, it is glaringly obvious that the authorities are not confident in their ability to control them.

Take, for example, the case of Nikita Gorelov. In October 2024, this mobilized sergeant and sniper became the mayor of Sosnovka, a small village in the Kirov Oblast. He immediately began blowing the whistle on local government corruption, quickly clashing with regional United Russia functionaries. Officials attempted to ship the soldier back to the frontlines, but local residents rallied to his defense. Now imagine thirty such volatile scenarios playing out on the floor of the State Duma.

Unlike the typical careerists from the “Young Guard” (United Russia’s youth wing) or the graduates of Sergei Kiriyenko’s (first deputy chief of staff of the Presidential Administration) management competitions, war veterans simply do not fit into the established matrix of political subservience. According to insiders, they are widely perceived as “uncontrollable” — figures who might demand far more independence than is customary in Russia's tightly scripted political arena. The logic is straightforward: the less consolidated this group remains, the easier it will be to manage them.

Then there is another awkward question: exactly which veterans will the state designate for the Duma? The “veteran” category turns out to be politically murky. Frontline soldiers, rear-echelon officials, mobilized men, contract soldiers, pardoned ex-convicts, combat medics... Voters might reasonably ask: why does one “hero” get a Duma mandate while another is left rotting in the trenches? Furthermore, if these individuals wake up tomorrow and begin to see themselves as a unified political force, what then? Should they be pitted against one another just to ensure they don’t “eat United Russia alive”? This is why the Kremlin faces a dual, contradictory task: it must visibly bring veterans into the halls of power, while simultaneously preventing them from becoming an independent political actor.

The problem is that even at lower levels of government, the integration of veterans is already floundering. In recent regional elections, many military candidates lost their party primaries. In the Federation Council (the upper house of parliament), new colleagues drawn from the military have been unofficially branded as “black sheep” and mocked for their inability to “string two words together.”

Moreover, despite the high level of societal respect afforded to war participants, there is no reliable public data indicating how this reverence translates into actual votes at the ballot box. For political parties, running a veteran is a gamble that by no means guarantees victory. While parties publicly declare their enthusiasm for nominating SMO veterans, in practice, it seems everyone is searching for backdoor compromises.

Some are relying on party lists, where election outcomes are much easier to control. Others are placing them in single-mandate districts (where voters elect a specific candidate rather than voting for a party list), seemingly banking on the assumption that rival parties will refuse to campaign against “war heroes” out of ideological deference. Ultimately, the goal is performative participation with absolute minimum risk.

All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of rapidly deteriorating social sentiment. According to VCIOM (Russian Public Opinion Research Center, the state-owned polling agency), the happiness index of Russians in the spring of 2026 plummeted to its lowest level in fifteen years. The authorities are being forced to maneuver carefully: they are already purging overly radical deputies from the public sphere to avoid inflaming domestic tensions. Against this volatile backdrop, the prospect of introducing an unpredictable bloc of veterans suffering from PTSD into the new Duma looks exceptionally risky.

The Russian authorities have backed themselves into a tight corner of their own making: these “war heroes” are desperately needed as ideological symbols, but they are far too dangerous to be empowered as real political actors. As a result, the Kremlin is once again losing face, quietly retreating from its own fiercely declared principles.