As the year starts in Russia, the reintegration of soldiers and upcoming regional and Duma elections are on the mind of the authorities. The Kremlin is creating pathways to spread the cost of and responsibility for veteran reintegration, while regions continue to tinker with their electoral systems to make it easier for the ruling party to preserve its position. I briefly discuss this and an assortment of other regional news below.

Shifting reintegration costs

The authorities’ ability to absorb war participants returning from Ukraine in a way that will not see them develop into a source of political risk will remain an issue of concern throughout this year – obviously, as I have laid out in a recent report for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, much more so in case active hostilities in Ukraine end or are paused sometime this year. The government is acutely aware of this risk, and, as the report warns, is creating the legal and institutional pathways to decentralize responsibility for solving the problem.

In January the State Duma adopted, in the first reading, a bill that will accord “Special Military Operation” veterans the same preferential treatment as currently benefits disabled WW2 veterans and the spouses of conscripted men with children, making it more difficult for employers to lay them off. Given that the expectation is that traumatized veterans returning from the front (who, under current legislation, have the right to return to their former jobs within three months) are going to be less productive than other employees on average, this in fact shifts the cost of their integration from the government to employers. Currently, regional governments are already encouraged to incentivize employers to employ returning war participants via training, subsidies and wage support, but the new law, when adopted, will give the authorities an additional stick too.

The authorities have released contradictory information about the reintegration of returning soldiers over the past month. Journalist Farida Rustamova spotted in January that a December news flash on the website of the state-controlled RIA News Agency, in which a Kremlin official claimed that some 250,000 former soldiers were not employed, was modified with the number removed. Meanwhile, in the same month the Kremlin had claimed that 167,000 soldiers had returned from Ukraine, 30,000 more than as of March 2025 (albeit this, according to Kommersant, means only those who have received a veteran certificate). In December the “Defenders of the Fatherland” fund, the umbrella organization created by the Kremlin (and overseen by deputy defense minister Anna Tsivilyova, Putin’s cousin) as a one-stop-shop for soldier reintegration, reported that 55 percent of the veterans that had asked the fund for help “found a job with a decent salary” (however, the total number of war participants that had gone through the fund was only 16,500). Interestingly, the fund’s figure was slightly lower than the overall percentage (57%) reported by the government six months earlier, in June.

One important circumstance complicating the reintegration of returning soldiers is that the “war participant” label covers several distinct groups: mobilized soldiers, contract soldiers, members of volunteer battalions and territorial defense forces, mercenaries (among them a high number of felons) as well as pre-existing members of the administrative elite who are trying to benefit from the Kremlin’s push to get returnees employed through training programs run by various bodies of the state. In the Kremlin’s rhetoric, the pretension is that these groups are, if not homogenous, at least marked by their big common endeavor as their defining quality. This creates the illusion of a rapid social mobility pathway, which is central to the Kremlin’s effort to support recruitment efforts and shape social norms regarding former soldiers, but it is not true. The state will likely care very differently for distinct groups of war participants as they reenter civilian life.

According to official data, as of late 2025 more than 70 war participants who were handpicked for one of the (so far) two tracks of the “Time of Heroes” federal training program have been appointed to ministerial or mayoral-level positions or to federal organizations. Most (albeit not all) of these war participants have held positions in public administration or the military prior to their deployment in Ukraine and their subsequent elevation through the program. Appointments from the regional equivalents of Time of Heroes, which are expected to cover a wider range of war participants, have started only recently, and as expected, the positions occupied by participants are much more modest and apolitical, generally deputies to actual institutional leaders. Still, mobilized servicemen and contract soldiers will likely stand a better chance to enter the ranks of the administrative elite through these regional programs than through the federal track.

The handful of war participants appointed through these programs will likely be held up as examples of the successful reintegration and elevation of war participants by the authorities, even if they do not actually hold positions with actual influence (which some nevertheless do or might in the future). For a much higher number of returning soldiers, the costs of retraining and employment will likely fall primarily on employers (both private and state-owned companies) and, partially, on the budgets supporting them. A third group will likely be absorbed by the gray – or outright illegal – economy. It is worth remembering that tens of thousands of (according to Ukrainian Intelligence, up to 180,000) soldiers were recruited from the prison system and criminal acts committed by returning soldiers already constitute a major problem with at least 423 people killed and additional hundreds hurt. Statistics have so far understandably focused on violent crime, which is more visible, but over time the traces of pathways for former soldiers into the criminal economy will start to emerge too.

Changes in regional elections

Electoral legislation in Russia is malleable. As I laid out in a blog post a couple of years ago, rules governing elections to the State Duma have been in constant change over the past decades, mostly in order to help engineer a stable majority for the ruling party in spite of fundamental shifts in political circumstances. While various forms of rigging, coercion and falsification have become more common in Russia over the same period, institutional changes still fulfill important functions, including reducing the need of outright rigging and making it more difficult for anyone within the established elite to mount a challenge.

Regions often serve as laboratories where later federal-level policy changes are tested and regional and local elections have been also undergoing numerous changes over the past years to benefit the ruling party. Notably, the number of seats allocated in a proportional system, where voters choose between party lists, has steadily declined in most regions over the past years, allowing ruling-party candidates to strengthen their position.

This is especially important when, as in this year, regional elections are held on the same day as elections to the State Duma, since this means a somewhat, if not staggeringly, higher turnout than in regional elections in other years when it is usually enough for the authorities to mobilize the core categories of voters whom they can more easily coerce or motivate, such as public sector workers, pensioners or employees of large state-owned corporations.

Only in one of the 39 regions where legislative elections will be held in September has the number of seats grown; in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District, where deputies created two mandates to make up for self-governance units scrapped under the Kremlin’s municipal reform. Meanwhile in several other regions the trend is the opposite. In the Vologda Region, which under its ultraconservative governor, Georgy Filimonov, has become an incubator for some extreme policies, there was a discussion about eliminating party lists altogether. This has not happened, but the region did remove the so-called “general part” of party lists, which were usually headed by the best-known and most popular figures of the respective parties, allowing other candidates to benefit from their name recognition. In the Lipetsk Region, however, both the total number of deputies and the number of those elected via party lists have been reduced. Similar changes have been discussed and implemented in the Maritime Region and in the Kursk Region.  

Over the past years this kind of very direct electoral engineering has been a feature of regional, but not of federal-level legislative elections. This suggests that the Kremlin sees federal-level legislative politics manageable and sufficiently non-competitive as it is now, without the need to give further institutional advantage to the ruling party. At the regional and local level, however, politics has so far remained more pluralistic, with local opposition candidates – even in so-called “systemic” opposition parties – able to offer something closer to a real alternative, either by courting protest votes or by seeking cooperation with local civil society and the “non-systemic” opposition.

The reform of regional and municipal public administrations over the past five years as well as the criminalization and disenfranchisement of non-systemic opposition activity have also created tools for the federal center to reduce political pluralism in regional politics, but regional legislatures, traditionally political playgrounds for local elites, are apparently still considered to be dangerously pluralistic, especially in regions where systemic opposition parties have strong organizational structures.

Also-happeneds

• What to cut: 2026 will be a lean year for regional finances. Many regions adopted budgets with planned deficits amounting to 10-20% of their income, the rest to be covered by additional federal transfers or debt. I have covered some of the budgetary cuts in regions whose core industries are in trouble, in an ongoing series for Riddle. But it is not only industrial regions facing hardship. Take the Transbaikal Territory, one of Russia’s poorest regions, for example. The regional parliament cut social payments substantially in this year’s budget, including housing and utilities compensation for families including pensioners, as well as for people living and working in remote rural areas. The region’s parliamentary deputy, Andrei Gurulyov was unusually candid about the reasons why the federal budget, which would usually be expected to fill the gaps, cannot do so this time, explaining that a federal program to rehouse people living in dilapidated buildings has essentially been suspended “since the start of the Special Military Operation”, with its terms now modified, shifting the financial burden on the population. Gurulyov was answering questions from frustrated residents. Payments on social support have actually grown in regional budgets, on average, over the past years, but this is itself a consequence of the war, not an increase of existing payments. Still, regions are usually reluctant to cut social support due to the political risks associated with it. Investment projects are more readily suspended. On this note: the federal government has decided to further postpone the construction of the Northern Latitudinal Railway, a Soviet-era project valued at 800 billion rubles. The construction of the railway was to begin last year, but Russian Railways was unable to finance it.
• I’ve got a minister for that: Gleb Nikitin, the head of the Nizhny Novgorod Region announced the creation of a “ministry for demographics” in 2026. The new minister is to follow demographic trends and come up with ideas on how to improve fertility rates. Since the inclusion of this goal in the key performance indicators (KPIs) of governors in December 2024, regional leaders have publicized a range of ideas, ranging from the wishful but sensible to the downright outlandish, all while regions are forced to cut health care expenditures (occasionally with tragic consequences, see e.g. in the Kemerovo Region). The Nizhny Novgorod Region will keep spending on education and health care roughly at level in real terms in 2026 (at least considering the Central Bank’s official inflation figures), while 9.2 billion rubles will be earmarked for “stimulating fertility” – however, as in several other regions, corporate income tax projections are 30 percent lower than they were for 2025. Both this earmarking and the appointment of a specific minister likely serve the purpose of signaling to the Kremlin, which can allocate further transfers and preferential loans to regions, that Nikitin, a shrewd communicator, is busy working on an issue so important to the president. The governor also added that the results of the past six months are “cause for optimism”, but since demographic statistics have been classified for the past year, this is impossible to verify.   
• Wasted time: An old hobby horse of mine is the Kremlin’s 2019 waste management reform, which, for several reasons that I have outlined in earlier articles, is a perfect example of how policy planning in Russia is often inspired by solid analysis, but execution is hijacked by vested interests. The newest development in the execution of the failed reform is the adoption, by the State Duma, of an amendment that will allow the continued use of illegal waste dumps until 2028. Under the previous iteration of the law, these should have been closed before January 1, 2026 (itself a result of a previous extension in 2023). The number of illegal landfills in Russia started to drop after 2022, although it is unclear how many were simply reclassified. Due to the high costs of replacing illegal landfills with legally certified ones (according to estimates in the Russian press, the cost of a new landfill that meets regulations can be as much as 2 billion rubles), municipalities with a shrinking fiscal space and regional waste operators have been reluctant to do so. The new rules do not change the incentives substantially, but they do make governors personally responsible for executing the policy. The hope seems to be that getting the regional government involved, which also provides a significant part of municipal finances, political pressure will move the issue ahead in the list of priorities.  
• Arrests of regional officials have continued over the past weeks. The current wave has started over the summer and has seen dozens of officials under arrest, among them regional ministers and deputy ministers, in what many have labeled a coordinated repression against regional administrative elites. The case I would like to highlight is the arrest of a former head of the regional council of ministers in the Ivanovo Region, who is accused of influence peddling related to municipal appointments. Specifically, according to the Federal Security Service, he sold the position of head of a municipal district to a local businessman – something not unheard of in Russian regional politics. The arrest is nonetheless notable because it happens at a time when governors, most of whom currently are so-called “Varangians” (technocrats without links to the regions they are leading) are given additional powers to influence municipal appointments, with the goal of strengthening vertical control over local elites. It’s worth watching whether we’ll see more cases of this sort.
• Repression in Bashkortostan: At the end of December a court in Izhevsk, Udmurtia sentenced the last remaining “regular” defendants in the so-called “Baymak Case” to several years in prison. The crime of the defendants, several of them young people, was simply attending protests in 2024 in defense of Fail Alsynov, a Bashkir activist who himself faced a long prison sentence. The organizers of the protest, which the authorities labeled “mass disorder”, are still facing a trial in the Orenburg Region. The Baymak protest was, as of today, the last large protest against a regional governor in Russia and the response of the authorities has been ruthless. According to Idel-Real, a total of 68 people have been sentenced to prison, most of whom are recognized by Memorial as political prisoners. The harsh response could have been motivated by the shaky position of the region’s governor, Radiy Khabirov, but also by growing anxieties about domestic unrest in a region that has seen disproportionate losses in the war in Ukraine.
• “A giant vacuum cleaner” was how Maxim Zolotukhin, a deputy in the Krasnoyarsk Territory’s regional legislature described current institutional and economic incentives that have led to the rapid depopulation of Siberia, at a scientific hearing. From over 20 million at the fall of the USSR, the combined population of Siberian regions has now fallen to less than 17 million and if current trends continue, it will be under 12 million by the end of the decade. Zolotukhin named “reindustrialization” as the key to improving the situation; this is the hobby horse of Sergey Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, who regularly mentions his plans to build cities in Siberia around industrial clusters, and no doubt the deputy was trying to appeal to his attention too. Shoigu, who himself needs to package his policy proposals in language that appeals to his boss, has most recently talked about the practicalities of creating a rare earth processing center in Siberia to help Russia achieve technological sovereignty. These industrial centers may very well be created; but the industry-centered view reflects Soviet-era reflexes that led to the creation of (still-surviving, but not thriving) monotowns in inhospitable regions, such as Norilsk, and the legends in public consciousness associated with them. It will hardly address the more important circumstances that are accelerating depopulation and making repopulation more difficult: the lack of adequate social infrastructure for a reasonably comfortable living, creating which is impossible without major capital injection, either directly from the federal budget or via regional budgets that currently lack the funds. And this is just one of the two ways in which the focus on the war is making the solution of this problem impossible. The giant vacuum cleaner has a name, it just cannot be said.