Demand for antidepressants including Prozac is soaring in Russia as the fourth anniversary of Vladimir Putin‘s illegal invasion of Ukraine looms. Around 22.3 million packages of antidepressant drugs were sold in 2025, the equivalent of £200 million and almost the double the amount bought in 2022, according to analytics company DSM.

The apparent mental health crisis has been linked to a spiralling economy, as funds are poured into Putin’s war machine, and a culture of fear, with over 20,000 Russians arrested for anti-war activities between 2022 and 2025. Citizens are unable to buy everyday essentials such as potatoes, which have spiked in cost by 167% following failed harvests, while welfare and education spending have also reportedly been slashed in favour of military aggression. Russia‘s economy is also continuing to reel from the Western sanctions imposed after the Ukraine invasion, with its oil and gas revenue plummeting to a five-year low of 393.3 billion rubles (£377 billion) in January.

The European Union (EU) has levied 19 rounds of sanctions on Moscow since February 24, 2022, across sectors including luxury and consumer goods, aviation and energy.

While the Russian economy proved relatively resilient during the first three years of the conflict, it slowed sharply in 2025 as interest spiked to its highest level since the 2000s.

The number of antidepressants sold to the country’s population of around 143 million has also steadily climbed since the conflict broke out, growing from 13 million in 2022 to 15.3 million in 2023 and 17.9 million in 2025.

Alongside the economic strain, Putin’s determination not to ease pressure on Ukraine has seen a nationwide recrutiment campaign and hundreds of thousands of casualties – an emotional toll that has reverberated across the country.

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A 40-year-old teacher told Radio Free Europe last year: “Initially, every death was discussed and we attended funerals.

“Now I don’t even know who was the last one to die, or if they died at all, or how many of them.”

At least 325,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the fighting according to a report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies – five times more than in all Russian and Soviet conflicts combined since the Second World War.

Fears of being called up to fight as part of Putin’s stated aim of recruiting around 400,000 more men in 2026 are also propounded by a terror of expressing opposition and being thrown in jail, after a drastic escalation of Moscow’s clampdown on critics of the regime.

Since the war broke out, citzens have been imprisoned for denouncing the Ukraine invasion as a crime, performing “banned” songs and affiliation to “undesirable” Western organisations.