In St Petersburg, 37-year-old Maria learned only after her 59-year-old father Yury's death that he had quietly enlisted — and married a woman 22 years his junior just two days before leaving for the front, per CNN's reporting.

Under Russian succession rules, that made the new wife his legal next of kin — first in line for the state's death benefit, ahead of his own daughter, who says she had never even heard the woman's name.

When Maria later visited her father's flat, she found it had already been sold to new owners who insisted the sale was lawful. The bride, the buyer and the money were gone — CNN reports Maria was left holding a set of keys to a home that is no longer hers.

CNN's reporting points to a wider pattern behind these unions: hurried courtships timed to a soldier's deployment, and in some cases, marriages performed at a wounded soldier's bedside.

One case involved a military hospital nurse dismissed after being accused of marrying five injured servicemen in her care, shortly before each died of his wounds.

In Tomsk, a real-estate agent, Marina Orlova, was recorded on a podcast telling a host that marrying a deployed soldier for the survivor payout was a workable way to fund a cheap apartment purchase. After public outrage, per CNN, both women were prosecuted and sentenced to community service, and ordered to apologise to soldiers and their families.

In Ryazan, per CNN, soldier Georgy Kostyrko married Angelina Varyukhina just ten days after meeting her online, during a short spell of leave. He later filed for divorce after she posted online content with other men — but was killed in action before it was finalised.

Varyukhina argued the posts were meant to provoke jealousy and that the couple had since reconciled. Kostyrko's mother challenged her claim to next-of-kin status in court.

The most serious claims, per CNN, come from Primorsky Krai in Russia's far east, where media reports describe an investigation into a warrant officer, a sergeant and a military accountant.

The trio is alleged to have targeted recruits with no close family, arranged rushed marriages for them, and then deliberately assigned them to high-risk combat missions — allegedly to trigger the survivor payout sooner. No official update on the case has been released.

The backlash has reached the Russian parliament. Lawmaker Leonid Slutsky has said families of servicemen need protection from aggressive fraudsters and predatory actors chasing combat payouts, warning that such offences are becoming significant in scale, CNN reports.

The debate sits inside a wider strain on Russian society — rising casualties, economic pressure, fuel issues and cross-border strikes — that has made the payout scandal an unusually raw public nerve.