Recently, there has been talk that the war in Ukraine might end in 2026.

Many people are waiting for that moment with relief, and understandably so. But when the shooting stops, the war does not simply vanish. Millions of soldiers will have to return to civilian life.

A returning soldier brings more than a uniform. He brings habits, trauma, expectations, anger, injuries, and a new sense of status. If the state fails to turn fighters back into citizens, the war moves from the front into families, streets, workplaces, police stations, and local politics.

For Russia, this danger is especially real.

Today, we’ll look at what happens when masses of veterans come home, how other countries dealt with this problem, and why Putin’s Russia is unlikely to follow any good example.

Here’s our roadmap:

The Soldier Problem — why mass returns from war always create social pressure.

America’s Big Bet — how the United States turned millions of veterans into students, homeowners, and workers.

Germany’s Defeated Men — how a broken country absorbed soldiers who came home as reminders of defeat.

Ukraine’s Hard Return — how Ukraine is trying to reintegrate defenders while the war continues.

Russia’s Time Bomb — why Russia faces the harshest veteran problem.

The Three Futures — what the best, middle, and worst scenarios could look like.

The Soldier Problem

When large numbers of soldiers come home at the same time, society receives several shocks at once.

First, many of these people have physical injuries. Then comes the invisible layer, such as PTSD: the damage caused by what a person saw, did, or failed to prevent.

Second, men return with new reflexes.

At the front, striking back instantly can save your life. The man who hesitates may die. But at home, those same habits can destroy a marriage or turn a small argument in a shop into a violent fight.

Third, the hierarchy changes.

On the front, a captain becomes a father and boss for his soldiers, almost a god. He calls all the shots. Then he comes back to a factory or a warehouse, and some civilian manager tells him he is late, careless, or not qualified. That’s a collapse of status.

Money adds another wound. If a man earned wartime pay far above his old salary, going back to civilian life can feel like humiliation.

The question of honor is even more dangerous.

Did you win? Then you are a hero, and you may demand privileges.

Did you lose? Then you may feel cheated and used.

Did society call you a hero yesterday and a problem today? Then bitterness becomes easy.

We have seen these patterns before – and states dealing with them more or less efficiently.

After World War II, Britain had to demobilize millions of people while rebuilding a damaged country. It had rationing, housing shortages, and a tired population. But it also had a state that expanded welfare, health care, and public responsibility. Veterans came home into hardship, but not complete abandonment.

Italy after World War I gives a darker lesson. The country was technically on the winning side, but many veterans felt betrayed. Nationalists spoke of a “mutilated victory.” Unemployment, anger, wounded pride, and paramilitary violence helped feed fascism.

The Soviet Afghan veterans show another warning. They came home from a dirty, unpopular war into a country that was already cracking. Some found brotherhood in veterans’ groups. Others moved into security work, politics, or the criminal world of the 1990s where their skills of war found new employers.

America’s Big Bet

One of the best examples of reintegrating soldiers into the society is the United States after World War II.

Millions of Americans served in the armed forces during the war. If the government had simply thanked them and pushed them into the street, the country could have faced unemployment, anger, political radicalism, and crime.

Instead, Washington made a big bet. It treated veteran reintegration as a national project.

The key tool was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. The law helped veterans pay for college and vocational training. It provided unemployment support. It helped them buy homes through loan guarantees.

Socially, it was explosive in a good way.

A young man who had spent years in uniform did not have to return home and fight for the same low-paid job he had left behind. He could go to college. He could train for a profession. He could buy a house and start a family. That felt like the state opened new doors as a gratitude for his service.

By 1947, veterans made up nearly half of all college admissions in the United States. Millions used education and training benefits. The GI Bill helped expand the American middle class and nudged veterans into civilian status that did not depend on violence.

A typical American story about this period is: the veteran comes back, uses the GI Bill, becomes the first in his family to attend college, buys a small house, and raises children in a suburb.

Of course, reality was messier. Many veterans struggled, drank heavily, or carried nightmares. And the benefits were unequal. Black veterans had formally earned the same rights, but segregation and local racism often blocked them from using those rights fully.

Still, the larger lesson stands.

America’s success was powered by money, institutions, and a clear story: you fought, now you get a better civilian future. This is the part every state needs to understand. Veterans reintegrate when the civilian world offers a status that can compete with the status of war.

The United States did not solve the veteran problem completely. No state ever does. But it prevented millions of trained soldiers from becoming a stranded army inside their own country.

Germany’s Defeated Men

At that same time, Germany faced an even tougher challenge: it had to absorb veterans who came home with no clean story.

They returned from a war where their side was the aggressor and suffered a crushing defeat. Some came back quickly in 1945. Others returned years later from prisoner-of-war camps. Many came home to ruins, hunger, missing families, and women who had already learned to survive without them.

This is a very different homecoming from the American one.

In the United States, a veteran could say: “I helped defeat fascism. My country won. Now I deserve my place.”

In Germany, the returning soldier carried a harder question: “What exactly had he served?”

The answer was too dangerous to face directly, so postwar Germany often chose silence. Families wanted their fathers and sons back. And the country needed hands.

The Allies tried to denazify German society. On paper, it looked like a moral cleansing. But in practice, it was uneven.

Germany had too many compromised people and too few clean administrators. If every former Nazi Party member had been permanently excluded, the new state would have barely functioned. As the Cold War hardened, the Western Allies also began to care less about perfect denazification and more about building West Germany as a stable anti-communist state.

So many former soldiers and officials were quietly absorbed into the new institutions. This was simply the most practical thing to do.

The German veteran did not usually receive a heroic political mission but he received work. Later, as West Germany rebuilt, he received the possibility of normal, comfortable life.

The economic miracle did more than lift incomes. It gave defeated men a place to put their energy. Instead of fighting old battles in the streets, many were pulled into reconstruction.

Inside many families, the war remained like a locked room. Fathers did not explain what they had seen or done. Children sensed the darkness but were told not to ask.

That’s how Germany reintegrated its veterans, preventing their mass rebellion and rebuilding the country. But the psychological cost lasted for decades. The moral wound was buried, but it did not disappear.

Ukraine’s Hard Return

Today, Ukraine is facing the veteran problem alongside Russia. But the key difference is: Ukrainian soldiers are defending their country.

That gives their return a moral foundation Russia does not have. Ukrainian veterans can say: “We fought because we were attacked and our country had to survive.”

This means a society can build respect around defenders. It can name streets after them, invite them into public life, and teach children that these people stood between the country and destruction.

But moral clarity alone, though important, doesn’t magically solve all problems. It can’t give a man a prosthetic leg, pay his rent, or teach an employer how to hire a veteran who cannot sit in a noisy office because every sudden sound pulls him back to the front.

Ukraine has to do something brutally hard: reintegrate its veterans while the war is still raging on.

The front is still there. The economy is strained. Hospitals and rehabilitation centers are overloaded. Many people who should be receiving care are still fighting. By 2025, international organizations were already warning about the scale of the challenge.

Ukraine also faces a status challenge.

If society praises veterans in speeches but leaves them alone in offices, clinics, and queues, resentment will grow. A man may think: “I defended this state, and now this state makes me struggle through paperwork.”

There are already attempts to build systems. Ukraine has a Ministry of Veterans Affairs. International programs support employment, training, rehabilitation, and local services. In 2026, Ukraine adopted a veterans policy strategy through 2030, aimed at restoring veterans’ wellbeing and human capital, honoring service, and defining veterans’ role in security and defense.

This is the right direction. But the danger is still real.

Russia’s Time Bomb

Russia is bringing its veterans home from an aggressive war. This is the most dangerous case in our comparison.

Most of these men were poor before the war. Some came from depressed villages and small towns where normal work paid little and offered no status. At the front, they received money, weapons, belonging, and a myth: you are defending Russia from the whole West.

Then they come home.

The salary is gone or smaller. The propaganda still says they are heroes, but the local shopkeeper does not want trouble, and the employer may not want a person who explodes at every small conflict.

Now add the prison factor.

Russia recruited prisoners for the war, first through Wagner and then through Defense Ministry formations. Early on, the deal was: survive six months at the front, and you get freedom. Later, the rules changed, and many recruits had to serve until the war ended. But the social damage had already been done.

The state took men convicted of crimes, sent them into extreme violence, told them they were useful, and then returned them to civilian life with a hero’s label. This is loading a weapon and leaving it on the kitchen table.

Russian officials themselves understand the risk. In 2024, State Duma deputy Nina Ostanina warned that law enforcement needed to protect civilians from ex-convicts returning from the war. She said violent crimes involving demobilized soldiers would become more numerous if authorities did not act.

Independent researchers are already tracking the damage. The Russia Program reported in 2026 that nearly eight thousand veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine had been convicted of civilian crimes since 2022, including more than nine hundred violent offenses.

The Kremlin’s answer is not therapy but management.

Putin launched the “Time of Heroes” program to train participants and veterans of the so-called special military operation for civil service. The official language is noble: new leaders, patriotic service, the formation of a new elite.

But politically, the logic is clear. Dangerous men must be sorted. The loyal and presentable ones can be promoted. Some can enter local government, patriotic youth work, or state corporations. They become proof that the war creates leaders.

The less manageable ones may drift into security firms, criminal networks, radical nationalist groups, or private protection work for local bosses. Some will be sacrificed in court when public outrage becomes too loud.

This produces a new caste: veterans who are praised, feared, used, and kept dependent.

The Kremlin cannot easily let society condemn them, because that would damage the war myth. If the government says, “These men are dangerous,” people might ask: what kind of war made them this way, and why were they sent there?

So the state will try to force two stories to coexist: they are heroes, but you shouldn’t stand too close to them.

That is a terrible foundation for postwar life.

The Three Futures

After this war, veterans will definitely become one of the forces shaping Russia and Ukraine for years.

The question is what kind of force.

There are three possible future scenarios.

The best future is simple to describe and hard to build.

Russia would demobilize slowly, pay real benefits, treat trauma, control weapons, punish violent crime, and stop pretending that every returning fighter is automatically a saint. It would offer civilian status strong enough to compete with the status of war.

But under the current system, this is unlikely.

The middle future is more probable.

Russia manages the problem through propaganda, selective payments, police pressure, and co-optation. Some veterans get apartments, television time, and seats in local councils. Some sink into poverty, alcoholism, and silence. Some commit crimes. Some are absorbed into the security state. Violence rises, but the state contains it enough to avoid immediate collapse.

The worst future is darker.

The war ends badly or ambiguously. Russia demobilizes large numbers of angry men with combat habits, high expectations, low prospects, and a state story that says they are heroes betrayed by cowards.

They return to poor regions, broken families, unpaid promises, and local officials who fear them but cannot help them.

Some join gangs or enter radical nationalist politics. Some become tools of governors, businessmen, security officers, or criminal bosses. The violence becomes local first: beatings, murders, extortion, domestic terror. Then it becomes political.

In this scenario, Russia becomes dangerously similar to the Weimar Republic where veteran resentment and wounded dignity helped Hitler rise to power. I have a dedicated video about why this possibility is too real.

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