Russian ‘Black Widows’ Cash In on War Deaths
BY MATTHEW LUXMOORE AND MILÀN CZERNY
The Wall Street Journal
Nov 05, 2025
When Russian soldier Sergey Khandozhko got married the day after enlisting in October 2023, his family and friends were confused. The 40-year-old had never mentioned the bride. Nor had he spoken of marriage.
More puzzling was the 20minute wedding ceremony without photos or exchange of rings, and only one guest. Afterward, Khandozhko’s new wife even continued living with her ex-husband and their children, according to testimony and a court ruling reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
But alarm bells began to ring after Khandozhko died of injuries inflicted on the battlefield in Ukraine and his bride received the lump sum paid to every fallen soldier’s next of kin, the soldier’s sister-in-law said in an interview. The payout, totaling $200,000, is almost 20 times the average annual salary in Russia.
A judge in a Russian civil court ruled this year that Khandozhko’s bride, Elena Sokolova, had tricked him into marrying her so she could collect his inheritance. The marriage was annulled and Sokolova had to pay a 3,000ruble fine, equivalent to $37. Sokolova, who has appealed the court’s ruling, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Targeting Russian soldiers for financial gain has become so widespread in wartime Russia that people have begun to label the women who do so “black widows.”
Courts tackling the problem are trying to determine whether the marriages were genuine or entered into by the woman purely for financial gain upon their husband’s death.
Russian lawmakers have
proposed laws that would levy harsher penalties for those behind such acts or limit the benefits they can accrue from having married a soldier.
The phenomenon stems in part from the large payments Russia has had to offer to entice men to risk their lives on the front lines of its brutal war with Ukraine. That includes high salaries and bonuses for joining and large payouts to the families of those who die on the front lines.
Payouts to families of deceased soldiers often exceed 14.5 million rubles, depending on rank and circumstances. The money has flooded poor Russian regions from which many front-line soldiers hail, provoking feuds between relatives over the proceeds, and attracting those looking for a share.
Estranged fathers have reappeared laying claim to part of the proceeds, according to court statements reviewed by the Journal. Grandparents have demanded money as recompense for having spent years caring for a grandson taken in battle.
But Russian lawmakers and officials said schemes in which women alone or as part of a group persuade soldiers into marriages before they go to war—in the hope of benefiting from their deaths in battle— are particularly pernicious.
“These monsters have chosen to disgrace the most sacred thing—care for the families of fallen heroes!” lawmaker Leonid Slutsky said this summer.
Russian legal experts said the true scale of the problem is hard to ascertain. The Journal identified half a dozen Russian court cases in which it was alleged or concluded that a Russian soldier or their relatives had been cheated through a sham marriage.
Social media makes it easy for potential scammers to find soldiers. On Russia’s VK platform, there are dozens of groups specifically for women seeking potential husbands serving in Ukraine.
Russian authorities said criminal gangs are involved in some of the scams.
One gang operating in the central Russian region of Khanty-Mansiysk sought out single men and persuaded them to sign military-service contracts, according to the Investigative Committee in the region. The group then arranged sham marriages for the men and persuaded them to hand over control of their finances, the Investigative Committee said. The scam netted around 30 million rubles and was prosecuted under organized-crime laws. In February, a Russian prosecutor in the country’s far east alleged that a married couple had duped a 46-year-old man without relatives into marrying their 63year-old female accomplice before persuading him to sign a military contract.
“The goal was to steal the money in an event giving rise to a payment for relatives since they understood that the man had no other heirs,” the prosecutor’s office said. When the man died, the group opened a bank account in the name of his widow, applied for the funds owed to his next of kin and shared 8 million rubles among them, according to the prosecutor’s office. The marriage was declared invalid and the case, in which neither the soldier nor the suspects have been named, is continuing.
Some lawmakers have called for criminal liability against individuals who enter a sham marriage with a soldier to receive state benefits.
Two other lawmakers have proposed legislation designed to deny divorcing wives the right to a share in their exhusband’s service payments if the couple married after the start of the conflict.
In April, a Siberian court found a real-estate agent guilty of inciting hatred and enmity by urging women to marry soldiers for “self-interested reasons.” The agent, Marina Orlova, had spoken on a podcast about meeting women who were trying to purchase homes with large sums of money they had obtained by inheriting it from soldiers.
“It’s very easy. Find a guy serving on the front, and when he dies you get 8 million,” Orlova said in the podcast. “It’s a business plan.” Orlova didn’t respond to a request for comment, but in a video posted online by the local police, she apologized for her statement on the podcast.
Some of the cases reviewed by the Journal involved messy family disputes over payments from fallen soldiers.
In August 2024, Angelina Varyukhina married Georgy Kostyrko, a 27-year-old soldier, in a town southeast of Moscow. The couple, who met on social media, lived together for 11 days, according to court documents containing the court’s decision about the couple’s relationship, before Kostyrko returned to war.
Kostyrko filed for divorce several months later, and in February, a Russian judge annulled the marriage, allowing one month for the decision to be appealed. Two weeks later, Kostyrko was killed on the front line in Russia’s Kursk region, and a day after that, Varyukhina appealed the annulment of her marriage, Kostyrko’s mother Olga Kostyrko told Russia’s NTV television channel.
That left Varyukhina as the beneficiary of Kostyrko’s death payout, said Andranik Grigoryan, the lawyer representing the Kostyrko family. The soldier’s mother then sued Varyukhina, alleging she had been unfaithful to Kostyrko throughout their brief marriage and was seeking to profit from her son’s death, according to court documents published online by Grigoryan.
During the case, Varyukhina posted clips on Instagram of the couple goofing around in an apartment and dressing up in funny outfits. “Does anyone still doubt that we are right for each other?” she wrote in an April post, a month after Kostyrko’s death. She told NTV in April that she needed the payouts to cover debts with which Kostyrko had saddled her family.
Varyukhina, 22, didn’t respond to a request for comment and wasn’t represented by a lawyer in court. She lost the case in June and had her rights to the payouts revoked.
Grigoryan said the case was a lesson for Russian society. “Her attempt to profit from her deceased husband’s blood is not just immoral, it is pure betrayal,” he said.
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