Published by The Daily Mail (6th December, 2025)
The death seemed like one tragedy among so many on the Russian frontline. A soldier had died from the wounds he sustained just five months after enlisting into Vladimir Putin’s army.
Before signing up to fight, unemployed Sergei Khandozhko spent most of his days drinking with childhood buddies from Krasnaya Gora, a struggling rural settlement on a riverbank close to the border with Belarus.
He lived by himself in a house inherited from his parents. ‘Nobody in the village had ever seen him with a girl,’ said one local.
So his brother was surprised when Sergei’s wife stepped forward after his death to claim the compensation paid to families of fallen soldiers of 14 million rubles (£136,000) – instant riches in a region where average salaries are less than £7,000 a year.
Elena Sokolova claimed she had known Sergei for years. But in reality she worked in a military recruitment office and – seeing that he was signing an army contract – married him the next day when he was drunk. She did not even bother going to his funeral, held in a small Orthodox church on the town’s outskirts.
Sokolova is one of the most blatant examples of the ‘Black Widows’ cropping up across Russia – women who find lonely and often inebriated men they can marry, wave off to the frontline and then collect the ‘gropovye’, ‘coffin money’, paid out to families.
Scores of similar sordid stories are emerging, often coming to light only when outraged relatives seek to stop the payment of benefits to these opportunistic women.
Some involve families using their own daughters as ‘bait’ or officials getting kickbacks for tipping off girls about men who are being conscripted. In one disturbing case, a nurse in a military hospital was reported to have married as many as five seriously wounded soldiers to collect the cash after their subsequent deaths.
This is the legacy of Putin’s desperate bid to find fresh bodies to throw into his blood-soaked meat grinder in Ukraine as the Kremlin spends vast sums to sustain its invasion by enticing Russian men to risk their lives in combat.
‘Putin is a cynical, ruthless and calculating villain. He has dehumanised millions of Russians who have been deluded by propaganda and persuaded to sell their souls,’ says Vladimir Osechkin, a prominent Russian human rights campaigner who first exposed the use of prisoners in the armed forces.
He argues that it shows the moral and economic degradation of the regime. ‘People who lack empathy and compassion, who are poor and stupid, now see war as their only chance for a secure lifestyle. For people living in comfort and abundance, this seems monstrous, but for many Russians, it is about survival.’
Certainly the whirlwind marriage of Elena Sokolova and Sergei Khandozhko does not appear to have been the most romantic.
The groom, who left school at 15 and had been convicted several times for drugs, was drinking with friends to celebrate signing his army contract when he told them he was popping out for 15 minutes. During this time, he went to the local registry office, married Elena and then returned to join his pals. ‘She promised him drinks, sex, and money,’ said one.
The couple did not even spend their wedding night together. And, it later emerged, Sergei was unaware his bride – a former shop assistant responsible for registering military recruits – was already living with another man and their two children.
Their story came to light when the dead soldier’s brother sued to annul the union, suspecting that a ‘black widow’ had discovered Sergei owned a house and had had no military training, so was unlikely to survive long at the front.
‘She was giving out call up papers,’ said his brother, Alexander. ‘She got my brother drunk, signed all the documents, went with him to the registry. She got them wed. The next day she put him in the car to Kursk. He did not want to go.’
A lawyer testified that Elena hastily cashed her benefits – funded from both federal and regional budgets – even before the death certificate was signed. ‘As a military registration and enlistment office employee, she was among the first to learn of Sergei’s death and was able to receive the money without delay,’ he said.
The court in Bryansk ruled the marriage was a sham ‘to obtain financial benefits in the event of the husband’s injury or death’ after seeing Elena was unable to answer basic questions about the soldier’s scars and tattoos.
Anastasia Kashevarova, a hardline pro-Putin blogger, recently highlighted the case of a Siberian man who was handed over by corrupt police to scammers who got him drunk, married him to a woman he had never met and dispatched him to the frontline.
One month later, the victim went missing in battle, and six months later, under the rules, his ‘wife’ could collect his generous death payments. ‘There are many black widows,’ the blogger wrote. ‘Such women destroy the nation and the meaning of life.’
The Ukrainian military displayed a captured Siberian man, who told a similar story of being forced into both a fake marriage and into signing up for the army while drunk.
Another desperate 35-year-old man in occupied Crimea posted a video on social media claiming two police officers had forced him to join Russia’s army by beating him and threatening to plant drugs on him. He said they then stole his enlistment bonus and made him marry a woman 20 years his senior. ‘I don’t know who to turn to, what to do next,’ he said from his hiding place in an attic.
The funding of such generous coffin money seems unsustainable. It is believed more than one million Russian troops have been killed or injured since the full-scale invasion in February 2022, with reports suggesting Moscow must send at least 35,000 fresh troops into the maelstrom each month.
The Kremlin also has growing economic struggles, spending one-third of next year’s budget on war at a time when energy exports have collapsed, oil refineries are under attack and tankers have started being blown up in the Black Sea.
Indeed, it emerged last month that half of Russia’s regions are delaying or ending the compensation payments, which have tripled in value to lure recruits since the start of the war.
One woman estate agent in the Siberian city of Tomsk sparked outrage earlier this year by suggesting black widows should buy a new home, as she boasted about her warped business model on YouTube. ‘You find a fighting man in the special military operation. He dies,’ she said, laughing. ‘Many people do it like that.’
And a 27-year-old mother of three from Siberia, who was trying to become a social media influencer, is being investigated after bragging during a livestream video chat about the benefits of marrying a soldier who dies in the war. ‘I’m registering the kids in his name, we’re pretending to be like a “happy couple”. I get a one-time payment of 5million rubles (£49,000), and a monthly payment of 200,000 to 300,000 (£2,000 to £3,000),’ the shop worker says.
‘Plus, consider the awesome payoff: kindergarten, benefits, school benefits. A monthly payment like the wife of a serviceman. F**k, we’ll really live our life. F**k, we’ll go to the seaside. And then, long story short, he’ll be killed there, knock on wood. I don’t know if we’ll buy the house or not.’
Alcohol is a common thread in many stories involving men duped by black widows – such as the case being pursued by the family of Ivan Novopashin, a part-time saw-mill worker from a small forestry town in the Urals, who was conscripted in late 2022.
After spending more than a year in combat with a motorised rifle battalion, the 41-year-old was allowed home for a fortnight’s holiday. He spent these days drinking heavily, telling his family they could not imagine the horrors he had seen.
His sister-in-law Albina told local media that during one drinking bout, Ivan met a woman six years older who had four children by four different men. ‘She found out he was a soldier and unmarried, dragged him to the registry office and, in a drunken euphoria, he joyfully rushed off,’ she said.
‘The registry office insists he was sober, even though our neighbours saw him and said he was drunk.’
Nine months later, Ivan was killed by a Ukrainian drone. Albina said that when she and her husband went to tell his new wife, ‘there was such joy in her eyes, as if she’d heard “Bingo!” She doesn’t even know where he’s buried.’ She added that there are many similar ‘one-night marriages’ since Russians all know that only a small percentage of soldiers return from the front.
One prominent Russian military blogger recently revealed the average lifespan for their troops sent into combat was less than one month.She complained about specialist troops being replaced with untrained men ‘who do not even know how to shoot properly’. Recent Ukrainian videos show soldiers advancing towards their positions without weapons, flak jackets or helmets.
Ivan’s mother says the family know of another 25-year-old soldier in the village who married a woman aged 46 while partying back home on leave. ‘His mother was standing outside the registry office, crying,’ she said.
Ivan’s mother complained that Putin’s passing of a special law allowing troops to get married within a day while serving – bypassing the usual bureaucracy – had been disastrous. ‘It’s as if poison had been invented but there’s no antidote,’ she added.
One businessman in central Russia is facing charges of bribery and fraud after finding a lonely man and convincing him to marry his daughter – who was almost three decades younger and had never met her ‘husband’ – and then join the army. When suspicious relatives of the enlisted man went to the authorities, the businessman, Sergei Dmitrienko, tried to escape punishment by offering a two million ruble (£20,000) bribe.
Perhaps the most sickening case involves a black widow nurse who married five wounded men in succession on their deathbeds in a military hospital, according to a prominent military blogger called Roman Alekhin.
He said she was fired after her scam was rumbled, but warned that soldiers were vulnerable when returning from combat on leave or injured. ‘Their barriers fall and, in such conditions, they are much easier to manipulate, which is precisely what black widows take advantage of,’ he said.
Another journalist for the Russian Trud newspaper reported that some women marry soldiers two or three times a year for the huge benefits available, saying she learned of such cases from a Russian commander.
There was also a furore after one widow posted glamorous pictures posing in her bikini during a luxury holiday in the Maldives, funded with the payout from her soldier husband’s death a few weeks earlier. ‘I don’t care what anyone says,’ responded tattoo artist Valeriya Beseda-Kalinochkina, 34.
One pro-Putin political party is demanding ten-year prison sentences for women exploiting the war in this way. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia compares black widows to people looting food during the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.
Party leader Leonid Slutsky argues that the practice is causing financial damage to the state, undermining the institution of family and discrediting a system intended to support men joining the military.
Ultimately, however, these black widows symbolise the dog-eat-dog venality of a rotten dictatorship paying the price for its pointless war. ‘They show how Putin has morally corrupted the entire nation and degraded its people,’ said exiled Russian journalist Victoria Ivleva. ‘Death is the country’s motto now.’