The language of Russia’s war in Ukraine is changing, creating a vocabulary in which ordinary words and numbers have acquired stark new meanings. Terms such as “meat”, “arrival”, “zero” and “business trip” are being used by soldiers and their families to describe combat, death, punishment, desertion and the dangers of military service. Increasingly, civilians are adopting the same expressions to describe a reality that the Russian state officially denies or obscures.
The development of this wartime vocabulary is examined in an investigation published by the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which draws on research by social anthropologist Alexandra Arkhipova and psychologist Yuri Lapshin. The researchers analysed more than 6,700 messages written by military personnel and their relatives to Russia’s former human rights commissioner, Tatyana Moskalkova, between the end of April and the beginning of September 2025. According to Arkhipova, the material came from a leak.
The correspondence provides an unusual window into the experiences of Russian soldiers and their families. Moskalkova is appointed by the Russian Duma and is loyal to the Kremlin rather than independent, but thousands of people still contact her each year with complaints about alleged violations of their rights and freedoms. Among them are soldiers and their relatives.
For Arkhipova, the significance of the messages lies not only in what they describe but also in the language used to describe it. Soldiers, she said, have had to find ways of communicating about a reality that the Russian state denies. While the Kremlin presents an image of military heroes leading Russia towards victory, the complaints describe a military environment marked by violence, humiliation and the threat of death, including violence at the hands of commanders.
To navigate the gap between official language and lived experience, soldiers have developed a vocabulary combining military terminology, informal slang, euphemisms and numerical codes. Arkhipova and Lapshin have so far collected 77 such terms in a digital “Ethnographic Dictionary of War”, with more expected to be added. The vocabulary has also begun to move beyond the armed forces and into civilian life.
One of the terms is “Komandirowka”, meaning “business trip”. In the Russian military context, soldiers and their relatives use it as a synonym for participating in the war. The Wagner mercenary group also previously used the term when recruiting people for six-month “business trips” as part of what Russia calls the “SWO”, or “special military operation”.
The expression has older military roots. During the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Soviet and Russian officers used “business trips” to describe deployments of a specific duration. In the war against Ukraine, however, the term can also refer to military service without a fixed end date, including situations in which soldiers seek to be relieved of their duties through official channels.
Numbers have also become part of this vocabulary. Soviet military terminology used “Cargo 200” for the transportation of dead soldiers and “Cargo 300” for the wounded. The number “500”, however, has a different and more recent history. According to Arkhipova, it emerged on the Ukrainian side of the war in Donbas in 2014. It refers to soldiers who have deserted or whom commanders have labelled as deserters. The related verb means hiding as a soldier to escape a dangerous deployment or violence from superiors.
Perhaps more ominous is “Nol”, or “zero”. Among soldiers, a position called “zero” is considered particularly dangerous. It refers to the position closest to the front line, from which soldiers move into combat. The complaints examined by the researchers indicate that commanders sometimes send soldiers to “zero” as punishment or threaten to do so in order to extort money from them.
Arkhipova said that it is common practice in the Russian army for commanders to profit from ordinary soldiers, including by taking their bank cards and PIN numbers or forcing them to surrender payments. A related term, “obnulenije”, literally means “setting to zero”. Originally associated with mathematics and finance, it has acquired a much darker meaning during the war: the violent death of a soldier at the hands of a superior or fellow soldier, including an extrajudicial execution.
The researchers found the term in 45 of the texts they examined. In one case, a girl from near Moscow repeatedly appealed to the human rights commissioner to save her father from “obnulenije”. Arkhipova said civilians learn such terminology from soldiers returning from the front on leave, bringing home expressions that do not exist in the official language to describe what is happening in the war.
The vocabulary can spread even among children. Arkhipova recounted that a reader of her blog had told her that Russian children had begun calling a playground chasing game “obnulenije”, or “setting to zero”.
Another word, “Priljot”, traditionally referred to the arrival of an aircraft at its destination and appears on airport information boards. In wartime usage, however, Russians increasingly speak of “arrivals” when referring to Ukrainian attacks, both at the front and against populated areas. The term was used in an official statement by the governor of the Belgorod region, who said that 13 people, including two children, had been injured in the “arrivals”.
The expression can function as a euphemism because it is less precise than words such as “strike” or “hit”. Soldiers also use “bird” or “little bird” as informal terms for drones, while “clear sky” and “dirty sky” indicate whether there is a drone threat.
The language also reflects the financial dimensions of Russia’s war. Russian authorities have offered large bonuses to attract men into military service. Some of the complaints examined by the researchers concern alleged attempts to exploit those payments. One expression now used in Russian public discourse is “Black Widows”, referring to women accused of entering sham marriages with soldiers in order to obtain state compensation and bonuses following their deaths at the front. Such payments can amount to several million roubles, sometimes tens of thousands of euros.
Arkhipova said the complaints include descriptions of cases corresponding to this phenomenon, although the people submitting them did not themselves necessarily use the term “Black Widow”. One man alleged that in December 2024 he had been drugged while intoxicated and forced to marry a woman who subsequently obtained access to his bank account and stole more than one million roubles.
The term has also become familiar on social media and Telegram channels run by so-called Z-bloggers, ultrapatriotic supporters of the war. Videos have circulated purporting to show women instructing others to marry military personnel and then take their money.
At the most brutal end of this vocabulary is “meat”. Despite high salaries and recruitment bonuses, the individual Russian soldier can have a high financial cost while being treated as having little military value. The Center for Strategic & International Studies estimates that the Russian army has suffered around 1.4 million casualties since 2022, including between 400,000 and 450,000 deaths.
The war nevertheless continues, with Russian forces employing tactics in which the destruction of an entire assault group is treated as probable and acceptable. This is known as a “meat assault”, or “mjasnoj schturm”, shortened simply to “meat”. The metaphor recalls the older expression “cannon fodder”, carrying the same dehumanising implication.
Relatives writing to the human rights commissioner have described fears that fathers and husbands will be sent into such “meat assaults”. Their language reflects a conflict in which the distinction between military terminology and everyday speech is increasingly blurred.
The vocabulary documented by Arkhipova and Lapshin therefore does more than provide new names for military practices. It shows how soldiers and civilians are adapting language to describe experiences that official terminology cannot adequately express. As Der Spiegel’s reporting illustrates, words that once belonged to airports, mathematics, administration or ordinary conversation are being transformed by the war into codes for danger, violence, death and survival.
