The federal reform of municipal public administration continues to throw waves and upsetting people – unsurprisingly, even former war participants. This is just one of the many underlying political risks that the Kremlin is aware of but can do little to address in earnest – as Putin’s end-of-the-year press conference also reflected. More on this and an assortment of other regional news below.

The municipal reform and its discontents

Nine months after its adoption – and more than four years after its conception – the implementation of the Kremlin’s reform of municipal public administration keeps redrawing the political map of Russia’s regions, but also stirring up public and elite protests.

Over the past months, most Russian regions have, quietly if they could, implemented the reform, which, save for a handful of regions, scraps all lower-tier municipalities in the region, folds them into bigger municipal districts, scraps direct mayoral elections and allows governors to decide who can and cannot be a mayoral candidate in regional capitals. In a series of major cities – e.g. Krasnoyarsk, Izhevsk, Orenburg or Birobidzhan, but even in formerly relatively pluralistic cities like Yekaterinburg and Syktyvkar – governors have essentially handpicked mayors, using their new powers.

Some, however, are fighting back. In a notable case from November, the head of the Kirov Region city of Sosnovka, Nikita Gorelov spoke up against the municipal reform, which would. Notably, Gorelov behaved like an activist: he started collecting signatures and used the same arguments against the reform (primarily the risk of a further decay of public services and people losing access to government) as the protesters who in March rejected the implementation of the federal reform in several regions.

Gorelov’s story was similar to what happened in the Sakha Republic city of Olyokminsk in September where mayor Sergey Shcheblyakov resigned in order to precipitate a direct mayoral election before the municipal reform that, unlike in Kirov, would keep the two-tier system of public administration, but scrap direct mayoral elections in the region. In both cases, the mayors were essentially powerless to resist the regional government with anything else than with an appeal to grassroots support. Notably, while Shcheblyakov’s resignation did not halt the reform in Sakha, the local assembly did, after weeks of wrangling, call an election for January. The local branch of the United Russia party, loyal to the governor, managed to remove Shcheblyakov’s ally from the helm of the city assembly and have the Supreme Court of the republic determine the legality of the January election, but it is still regarded as a possibility even by the governor-appointed acting mayor who registered to take part in it.

What adds a further flavor to Gorelov’s story is that he is a former war participant and graduate of the Kremlin’s “Time of Heroes” program, one of the few without prior experience in public administration appointed to a position of leadership, however insignificant; as a former business owner who was mobilized after September 2022, Gorelov apparently took his role as a people’s administrator more seriously than his superiors would have expected.

In prior writings I have warned several times that the Kremlin’s push to appoint war participants to the administrative elite, however symbolic, could backfire when the handful of appointees who were not part of this elite before their military service actually start to think of themselves as the new elite and the representatives of other war participants and the “common folk” in general. At the federal level there was no question of appointing anyone without prior experience – save for the high-profile Donbas separatist and now Urals plenipotentiary Artyom Zhoga – to a position with real power, and at the regional level there has been enough pushback from existing regional and local elites to keep the numbers very limited. Yet, in order to keep recruitment numbers high and Putin’s promises about a new elite of war participants credible, there has been pressure from the federal government to increase the number of war participants in public administration. This however meant that most war participants were promoted to position in local government units, many of which the ongoing municipal reform aims to erase, creating an awkward conflict of interest.

Note also that many war participants had been on the “wrong” side of this issue even before Gorelov. War participants joined major protests against the reform in the Krasnoyarsk Territory earlier this year, while in 2024 soldiers at the frontline appealed to the government of the Kostroma Region, asking it to postpone the already ongoing public administration reform. They did not succeed, but Kostroma has remained one of the regions where local residents are still actively opposing the reform.

The news outlet Vyorstka has reported several times that in spite of its surface-level enthusiasm for the “new elite”, the Kremlin is actually afraid of the emergence of popular war veterans, and has thus carefully selected loyal people for its career ladder programs. Gorelov, who somehow slipped through the cracks, does indeed look like the exception rather than the rule. However, the problem is also wider.

As I am outlining in a new report for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, public administration is just one layer of the government that returning war participants will be exposed to, only to find that there is a gap between the Kremlin’s rhetoric and the Russian federal state’s capacity and political priorities. While Russia has the financial resources to put behind rehabilitation and reintegration efforts, its social infrastructure lacks the necessary capacity, particularly in the fields of healthcare and law enforcement. This problem is known to the federal government, but capacity expansion has been slow: a 300-bed military hospital that has just been opened in the Arkhangelsk Region, took three years to build; shortages of psychiatric practitioners qualified to treat post-traumatic stress disorder have led to the State Duma discussing recruiting veterans of other wars for this task. The list could go on.

Direct Line

Once again Vladimir Putin held his end-of-the-year press conference merged with his trademark choreographed call-in show, “Direct Line”. The show, which lasted for four and a half hours this year – a rather average length when it comes to Putin – was carefully timed to take place after the meeting of the European Council that failed to adopt the so-called reparations loan, likely to give Putin opportunity either to do a victory lap or to issue threats. And a victory lap he did, touting Russian military successes in Ukraine, underlining supposedly unchanged Russian war aims, and taking a dunk on weak Eurozone growth (even as the numbers and statements did not always add up).

The war was understandably Putin’s main focus, to the extent that several times he gave the floor to an army officer from Kalmykia to act as the loyal and grateful representative of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, while also quoting figures meant to underline that domestic support the war supposedly remains overwhelming (e.g. that according to official data, more than 400,000 people signed contracts with the Defense Ministry this year and the authorities collected 83 billion rubles worth of donations for the army; never mind that regional media reported employers pressuring officials and workers to give up part of their salary).

There were also several messages to Western audiences, as the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg and NBC’s Keir Simmons both got to ask questions, and Putin, predictably, mocked Volodymyr Zelenskyy. There was, as always, the odd series of questions about love, friendship and the motherland, allowing Putin to try and appear human (largely unsuccessfully). These could have been copy-pasted from last year’s broadcast and few would have noticed.

But Direct Line, in its heyday, used to have another function: to take the temperature of the Russian society by encouraging people to send questions to Putin. Of course, most of these never actually made it on air, but they let the Kremlin’s spin doctors know which issues Putin had to raise in the show, and what questions could be dressed up as a polite supplication to the benign tsar. This has now been largely supplanted by the enhanced collection of data and complaints by the federal government (which has been inspired by Direct Line) and extensive social media monitoring. Nonetheless, the domestic problems discussed by Putin and the way the president talked about them do say something about the issues that worry the Kremlin.

Take taxes, for example. Twice Putin mentioned recently introduced unpopular tax hikes – of the recycling fee for cars and of VAT – that have led to protests in several regions. In both cases, he stressed that the tax hikes were not permanent. In the case of the recycling fee, Putin also took a swipe at “well-earning” residents of “large cities” who, in his reading, were the ones hit by the recycling fee hike, highlighting once again how Kremlin is giving up on this demographic, once a core element of Putin’s coalition, as a new “wartime coalition” emerges. Perhaps relatedly, Putin warned Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin – once a champion of keeping urbanites in the pro-Kremlin coalition by fixing up the capital – that he should not “sit on his laurels”.

Putin also reviewed several questions about domestic shortages affecting the day-to-day life of citizens, among them rising electricity tariffs in the Sakha Republic, labor shortages in Tomsk, the provision of goods to remote parts of the Komi Republic, medication shortages in the Sverdlovsk Region, or the delayed payment of social support to a soldier’s wife. In all of these cases, Putin simply threw his hands up and pointed at regional and local officials. This is nothing new; however, the president also seemed to lose focus here and there when talking about these issues, suggesting frustration and a lack of understanding that the system somehow still refuses to run itself smoothly enough.  

Putin was also all too ready to point at circumstances outside of his government’s control when talking about delayed or failing policies such as the creation of a rare earth processing cluster in Siberia (“a task of a historical scale” for which “investors” are needed), or Russia’s demographic decline (“an issue that affects all major countries”); perhaps the grimmest moment of the whole excruciating four-and-a-half hours came when Putin spoke proudly of the many young men born in the 1990s currently serving at the frontline.

And while the fact that these issues were addressed suggests a degree of attention to them in at least some echelon of the federal government, another function of the Direct Line is to bury them as much as possible, by putting them on the same shelf as inane questions about “Satanism” or whether Putin still drives a car himself. To a significant extent the president’s team seems to regard framing as the core of the problems raised – the same way as Putin seems to think that the stricter enforcement of tax laws could still result in a significant increase of fiscal revenues. Both of these are questionable assumptions.

Also-happeneds

• A regional bill to watch: An underresearched power of regional parliaments is to act as “policy laboratories” and introduce bills to the State Duma, even though often these bills are not adopted. An interesting example from November is a bill supported by five regional legislatures – of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tyumen, North Ossetia and the occupied Sevastopol – proposing to abolish so-called public councils. The purpose of these councils is to conduct public discussions of adopted legislation and make recommendations to government bodies, but in practice, few regions have them. It seems that the bill’s purpose is to enshrine, in the law, the de facto already existing norm that these councils make little difference, if at all, as policies are dictated from the federal center and regional governments are usually entrusted to fine-tune their local implementation.
• Once again, trash: The federal Ministry of Environment suggested that regions and regional waste management operators jointly create “working groups” to monitor problems with waste removal over the winter holidays when the volume of household waste is higher. Earlier this year, the federal government more or less acknowledged the failure of an overarching waste management reform launched in 2019, and proposed a range of updates. However, hostility to bottoms-up policymaking and wartime fiscal limitations are preventing the authorities from initiating a radical overhaul of the system, as I laid out for Riddle in June. The working group proposal is essentially a signal to regional governments that the Kremlin expects them not to let people get angry during the holidays over a long-festering problem that the federal authorities regard as a political risk.  
• A Khakassian saga: The fascinating story of Khakassia’s law on interbudgetary relations, adopted more than a year ago, took another turn in early December. As a reminder: the United Russia majority in the regional parliament adopted a law removing the governor’s right to suspend budgetary transfers to municipalities if they overspend. Valentin Konovalov, the region’s communist governor who has been engaged in a power struggle with United Russia for several years, vetoed the law, but the United Russia supermajority in the regional legislature overrode the veto. Konovalov then took the matter to court, arguing that United Russia’s law ran counter to federal budgetary legislation, and, in October, won – only to see the same regional legislature adopt similar amendments to the law once again in November. This time, however, Konovalov signed the law, arguing that a legal review (and the court’s decision) allows him to exercise his power like earlier. This was not the only issue that saw clashes between the governor and the regional legislature this year (Konovalov also opposed the Kremlin’s municipal reform), thus it’s worth keeping an eye on whether the governor will indeed be allowed to exercise his powers.
• City budgeting under pressure: In Khabarovsk, teachers are suing the city government for higher salaries. According to Govorit NeMoskva, such lawsuits have recently been successful in several cities in the region, and there is an ongoing case across the country in the Kursk Region as well. Successful lawsuits are important because they create precedent at a time when cash-strapped municipal and regional governments are trying to save money on vital public services, including education and health care. In another Far Eastern city, Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky, the city authorities are meanwhile collecting donations from residents and local companies to cover the deficit of the city budget – a rarely seen fiscal maneuver, suggesting liquidity problems in the regional budget.
• Operational headquarters: The Ministry of Defense wants to put mayors and governors in charge of local defense during martial law. A bill introduced by the ministry this month expands the system of “operational headquarters”, already used during COVID, mobilization and in the occupied territories, where regional and local officials sit with representatives of the federal government and law enforcement agencies, to defense. The bill also puts territorial defense forces, which were formed in several regions, including the occupied territories and border regions, under the control of these headquarters. The system of operational HQs has in practice allowed security agencies to oversee and monitor regional and local officials implementing policy, while leaving political responsibility with them.