Russian authorities are sharply increasing their purchases of prosthetics to provide for the disabled from the war in Ukraine, whose number is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.
In the budget for 2026, for “providing disabled people with technical means of rehabilitation“, 98.16 billion rubles (over a billion euros) are allocated, highlighted Janis Klug, a researcher at the German Institute for International Security Issues.
Compared to the period before the war, public purchases of prosthetics have tripled: in 2020-2021, 33 billion rubles per year were allocated for these. In 2022, the amount increased to 37.2 billion rubles, in 2023 – to 42.2 billion, in 2024 – to 55.8 billion, and in the current year – to 75.4 billion.
The sudden increase in the number of Russians who have lost their arms and legs, related to the consequences of the war, was previously signaled by Timur Grishin, a member of the Russian Association of Prosthetists-Orthopedists:
“Of course, there is a huge influx of people with injuries who need both prosthetics and all technical means of rehabilitation. The number of people with ordinary disabilities has not increased. Unfortunately, they are now given much fewer means of rehabilitation,” writes Moscow Times.
At the end of 2024, 376,000 Russians suffered severe injuries on the front and became disabled, according to previous estimates of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). The total losses of the Russian army in the period 2022-2024, according to IISS calculations, were 783,000 people.
Of these, 172,000 died, and 611,000 were injured. Of the injured, 235,000 are considered curable, and the rest have remained disabled, the IISS experts indicated. Of the severely injured, one in two suffered limb amputation, a high-ranking Russian official familiar with the statistics previously told The New York Times.
Thus, based on IISS calculations, the number of disabled people who have suffered amputations among those who returned from the front could exceed 180,000. According to the Social Fund data, in the period 2023-2024, the total number of disabled people in Russia increased by 290,000, a record since 2005. At the beginning of 2025, 11.122 million disabled people were registered with the fund.