Expensive new cars and motorcycles crowd the streets. Apartment prices have more than doubled. And once-strapped residents are suddenly seen wearing fur coats and carrying ostentatiously overflowing grocery bags.

That is how one resident of a small, long-impoverished industrial city in Siberia describes her hometown these days. The explanation for the burst in prosperity lies in the isolated cemetery, with rows of Russian flags marking the new graves of soldiers killed in Ukraine, and also downtown, where a billboard lists the scores of local men who went to fight.

“I was stunned by how many,” said the resident, the wife of a middle-aged firefighter who enlisted last summer without telling her beforehand. “Money from the war has clearly affected our city.”

The Kremlin has been showering cash on men who enlist. It wants to avoid an unpopular draft, while also addressing the lack of men with sufficient patriotic zeal to join up. There are large signing bonuses, fat monthly salaries and what Russians call “coffin money,” a substantial payment to the families of the tens of thousands of soldiers killed in battle.

The money is changing the face of countless Russian backwaters like the Siberian city. “The allure of extremely high salaries and other benefits has been a major factor in attracting voluntary recruits, especially from relatively poor regions,” said a report issued this year by the Bank of Finland’s Institute for Emerging Economies. By improving the standard of living among Russia’s poor, the payments have spurred support for President Vladimir V. Putin and the war, researchers noted, while also changing the perception of fighters from patriots to “soldiers of fortune.”

The names and hometowns of the people living inside Russia who agreed to discuss these war payments are not being published to avoid possible legal problems for speaking publicly about the conflict.

Russia has stopped publishing various economic statistics, leaving only a patchwork of indicators about the effects of the war payments. Some studies have documented the influx, however.

For example, the Bank of Finland researchers found that the number of bank accounts in Russia’s poorer areas surged over the past year. Nationwide data was too uneven to establish a concrete correlation with signing bonuses and enlistment data, the study said, but general estimates of casualties by region coincided with the areas experiencing high growth in bank depositors. Also, in recent months, recruitment posters across Russia changed noticeably, replacing patriotic themes with financial offers. State TV and advertisements on social media carried the same messages.

“Pride of Russia,” some ads used to say, naming the soldier pictured, or “Homeland Begins with Family,” showing a soldier silhouetted with a mother and child. There were comparisons to heroic feats during The Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia.

Now, a rouble sign dominates the posters, which display the large sums on offer for signing a military contract. Payments vary by region.

“The people who wanted to join out of patriotic sentiment have mostly already been recruited and died or were wounded,” said Oleg Jouravlev, one of the founders of PS Lab, a group of mainly sociologists organised under the Russia Programme at George Washington University to study attitudes toward the war. “There are not many like that left in Russia.”

On July 31, Putin issued a decree more than doubling the contract signing bonus from the federal government to 400,000 rubles, or more than $4,000, from 195,000 rubles.

At least 47 regional governments followed suit after he encouraged them to match the reward, according to a survey by the independent media outlet iStories, with the average signing bonus nationwide quadrupling in the past eight months.

US officials estimate that Russia is recruiting 25,000 to 30,000 new soldiers a month, roughly equal to the number of dead and wounded.