What “poor Russian conscripts” is he talking about? The Russian soldiers fighting against Ukraine serve under official contracts and are paid for it. Their salaries are funded in part by the extra money Putin is receiving as a result of Trump’s recent decisions to waive some of the sanctions on Russia. And now, something very important. Russia pretends to be “great,” yet it is a very poor country. Its entire economy is comparable in size to that of the U.S. state of Texas. Millions of Russians live in economically depressed regions. For them, signing a contract with the Russian army is often the only realistic path to social advancement, because it lets them earn the kind of money they could only have dreamed of in their impoverished home regions. The families of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine are perfectly satisfied. They receive sums of money that their husbands or sons could never have earned, even if they had worked for the rest of their lives. That’s why our Russian human rights colleagues call this kind of economy a “necronomy,” meaning a “death economy.” Russia sells death. Literally. Yes, this bloody war must be stopped. And to stop it, we must make the cost of war for Putin higher than the cost of peace. So if Musk truly cares about the lives of Russian soldiers, America must break the Russian necronomy’s ability to fuel this bloody war. But the Trump administration has done exactly the opposite. America has begun to finance it. I am attaching to this post just a few examples of Russian state advertising, showing the amounts in rubles for which “Russian kids” go to kill Ukrainians.