United Russia and the Communist Party are both highlighting the number of war participants in their respective “primaries”, but what is the significance of this at a time when even the Prosecutor General is raising the alarm about the failure to provide a reintegration perspective to returning soldiers? Can regional finances be helped, barring a major turnaround in the real economy? I am discussing these questions as well as an assortment of other regional political developments below.

Primaries and care 

A report by Novaya Gazeta this month found that 261 participants of the war in Ukraine had registered to stand in the primaries of the ruling United Russia party, out of a total pool of 3,017 registered candidates. According to the party’s own communications, every 1 in 6 primary participants is a veteran. Notably, in Moscow and St. Petersburg this proportion is even higher, even though these cities are underperforming in military recruitment relative to their population. Like in previous years, the ruling party provides a 25-percent bonus for candidates who were “participants of the special military operation”, and plans to field 70 veterans as candidates for the State Duma. 

United Russia “primaries” are primarily mobilization exercises before actual elections. In most cases, the local races are not competitive. But political operatives, officials and the members of the local administrative and business elite can test and showcase their ability to turn out “reliable” voters for ruling party candidates. 

This exercise follows a fairly regular pattern. This month, for example, Krasnoyarsk political analyst Alexei Aksyutenko reported that public sector workers in the Krasnoyarsk Territory were being coerced into voting in the UR primaries. Specifically, managers of budget-funded institutions were issued leaflets spelling out how to register on the party portal and vote for specific candidates, with some institutions even planning to set up a dedicated room with a computer for employees to vote “voluntarily”. This is not new. Reports of similar forced voting in United Russia primaries were abundant in 2021 already. To stay with the same region, TVK Krasnoyarsk then reported that public sector workers in the region were pressured to vote for specific candidates, with reports numbering in the dozens within a single day of the primary opening. Online voting makes pressuring easier, even if it is not exactly invisible. Stanislav Andreychuk, the former co-chair of the “Golos” election monitoring NGO highlighted last year that there were noticeable peaks in remote electronic (online) voting turnout around 9 AM on the first day of elections when people arrived in their offices and voted under the supervision of management.

Public sector workers in the Belgorod Region, meanwhile, were reportedly being coerced to support a local initiative to integrate war participants into local government. A letter circulated to budget-sector organizations cited instructions from deputy governor Olga Medvedeva, responsible for regional political control, which directed institutions to mobilize their staff to vote for the project via the Gosuslugi government services portal. 

It is not just about mobilization in general: in this particular case the Kremlin is likely also monitoring the behavior of and the reactions to war participant candidates. While in recent years the number of war participants fielded and elected in regional and local elections has grown substantially (from 106 United Russia candidates elected in 2023 to 890 in 2025), the Kremlin is aware of the pushback that these candidates have faced from established elites and the political risks that the election of some of them created as when elected representatives started taking their role seriously. Therefore, the Presidential Administration has reportedly quietly tuned down expectations to elect one hundred Duma deputies with “war participant” credentials. The primaries will be a way to monitor citizen and elite reactions to individual war participants and decide whether they should be standing as candidates in single-member districts, on party lists, or not at all. 

Lastly, this is also about loyalty signaling, and this is not limited to United Russia. Engaged in a fierce battle for the position of Russia’s second largest party – which it may lose in September – the Communist Party is also eager to signal to the Kremlin that it is ready to integrate some war participants. The party’s first deputy chairman Yuri Afonin said that at least 11 war veterans would participate in the communists’ first ever primaries, including members of the Chechen “Akhmat” battalion. 

Nonetheless, the number of war participants integrated into public administration this way will likely stay low. Based on past appointments, they are much likelier to end up in appointed and supervised roles with narrowly defined powers and responsibilities in a field adjacent to the domestic war effort, such as veteran reintegration, “patriotic education” or similar. Thousands are also expected to finish their education in regional equivalents of the “Time of Heroes” training program this spring, and be appointed to serve in regional institutions and companies, after undergoing a mentorship period. But even this is a relatively small slice of returning soldiers whom the authorities need to reintegrate, and frustration is visibly growing with the shortcomings of this effort.  

At a Federation Council meeting in April, chief prosecutor Alexander Gutsan publicly condemned the Ministry of Labor’s handling of veteran employment and rehabilitation: only 1 in 2 returning war participants who sought employment assistance in 2025 actually found work, all while tens of millions of rubles allocated for job creation remained unspent; and retraining programs were inefficiently organized. Gutsan demanded action at the federal level, but it is likelier that the Kremlin will, as it has so far, pass the baton to regional governments, which need to engage the private sector. 

In November, the regional legislature of the Altai Republic passed a law requiring companies to ensure that at least 1.2% of their workforce consists of war participants. According to official bookkeeping, since the law was adopted, only 32 veterans were hired by companies across the region, so regional authorities have now approved amendments introducing fines of up to 25,000 rubles for companies and up to 10,000 rubles for individual officials that fail to meet the quotas. The law itself looks like an admission that the region lacks the resources to adequately deal with returning soldiers, as social workers are facing increasing caseloads and almost half of demobilized war participants have not been able to find a job. The authorities are increasingly eager to enlist the resources of the private sector, just as they have been in the field of military recruitment as well. 

This is happening on the federal level as well. While the federal government has allocated a substantial amount of money (almost 100 billion rubles in 2026) for rehabilitation aids for disabled people, it is trying to shift the long-term costs of their reintegration into the workforce onto others. A new proposal would expand employment quotas for disabled people beyond just head offices and branches to encompass all business units, from September on. Since disabled veterans count for two people under the current rules, this essentially signals to employers that the federal government wants them to employ more returning soldiers with disabilities, with all the costs associated with this in lost productivity, adapting workplaces, etc. 

The proposals are not only about shifting costs but also about normative control, with the authorities demonstrating that the war is a collective social effort, in which the state sets the rules, but the private sector must also participate with its own resources and initiatives. But with corporate profits shrinking for the second year in a row and a sharp rise in overdue corporate debt signaling a liquidity crisis, it is very unlikely that employers will be able to both take on an increasing proportion of war-related costs and increase investments as the Kremlin wants them to.  

Snip snap

Higher oil revenues driven by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz – estimated by Reuters at $9 billion for April – paused planned budget cuts, but are not enough to save the federal budget by themselves after a brutal increase of the deficit in the first two months of the year and growing signs of a slowdown across several sectors.

Even though the Finance Ministry is not planning to introduce major amendments to the federal budget (which would require a vote in the Duma), some cuts seem to be going ahead: the government cut spending on federal road maintenance by 11 billion rubles (2.5 percent) this year, by 20 billion rubles in 2027, and by a total of 100 billion rubles for the next six years, all while the budget of the federal road corporation Avtodor is also cut. Notably, road investment in the annexed Ukrainian territories was also cut, from 103.5 to 95 billion rubles. The Ministry of Agriculture also suggested cutting subsidies for the technological development of agricultural enterprises by more than 25 percent and tightening the rules of obtaining these subsidies.  

Regional budgets, most of which will not be helped by windfall oil revenues, are meanwhile cutting expenditures on core functions, such as housing, education and health care, as I am laying out in a new article for Riddle. Wage costs for public employees are also cut in certain regions, which in practice means suspended bonuses and closures of non-protected public jobs (regions such as Omsk, Irkutsk, Moscow and the Krasnoyarsk Territory are planning the biggest cuts), and regions facing severe liquidity problems are reducing even social expenditures. Cuts to federal transfers to regions will likely force further local-level cuts to non-investment spending budget lines throughout the year. 

To improve regional finances, the federal government continued its debt forgiveness program, with 41 billion rubles forgiven to 27 regions so far this year. The program has essentially replaced the previous policy of replacing regional debt with cheap budgetary loans: regions invest their own funds into infrastructure or other socially significant projects, and the federal center reduces their outstanding budget loan debt by an equivalent amount, up to 1 trillion rubles by 2030. On top of this, Putin also suggested that the government postpone the deadline to repay 100 billion rubles of debt from 2026 to a later date.

But this is a politically symbolic measure targeted at the most indebted, poorest regions, not a structural solution. Last year, domestic debt servicing costs grew by more than 30 billion rubles in regional budgets outside of Moscow as the restriction of subsidized lending and cuts to federal transfers forced regions, especially those running large deficits to shift the composition of their debt towards more expensive loans from the market. Data from the first two months of 2026 suggests that this will grow further. The total amount of debt written off in 2025-26 has been a little over 250 billion rubles – by no way insignificant, but not a panacea, either: expenditures on social policy grew by more than twice this amount in regions outside of Moscow in 2025 and total regional deficit was over 1.5 trillion rubles, with the Finance Ministry now expecting this to grow further in 2026, with several regions running deficits as high as 20% or more of their own revenues, with their reserves now exhausted. 

Furthermore, the federal government is executing this policy all while it is struggling to enforce conditionality on a similarly large infrastructure lending program. The Accounts Chamber audit of the Infrastructure Budget Credit program, which allocated around 700 billion rubles to regional infrastructure projects found that the program was functionally broken. Regions face no real sanctions for failing to meet loan conditions; selection rules are loose, project targets fail and some regions have even engaged in a kind of creative bookkeeping where they have simultaneously raised utility tariffs – a touchy political issue – by adding investment components, and taken out infrastructure credits.

Also-happeneds

• Stalin’ the onslaught: In April, Khakassia’s communist governor, Valentin Konovalov launched what he called a referendum on installing a Stalin monument in Abakan, officially at the request of a pro-Communist veterans’ organization. According to the official figures, 13,500 people, or 2.6% of the region’s population, participated in the vote that was held at various state-owned facilities and social centers, although there is no way to verify this independently. Of them, 78.5% voted yes, which Konovalov presented as evidence of wide public support. In itself, erecting Stalin monuments is not unusual in Russia: roughly a hundred now exist nationwide, with more than a third erected in the past decade. What makes the referendum notable is that Konovalov used it to signal to the local population and to the Kremlin that he is holding the reins of power in the republic, in spite of years of attempts by the Kremlin and its local allies to unseat him. The governor, who in 2023 saw off a challenge from a Kremlin-backed challenger with “war participant” credentials, but then faced a United Russia supermajority in the regional legislature, has been trying to assert his powers vis-a-vis the ruling party on issues such as the municipal reform and the budgetary powers of the governor, mostly successfully. Staging a referendum is a relatively cheap way to send a signal to the federal authorities. It is also notable – and shows the complexity of regional politics in Russia – that the other governor who made federal news in recent years with his Stalin monuments, is Georgy Filimonov, the ultraconservative governor of the Vologda Region, who, unlike Konovalov, has been strongly backed by the Kremlin and disliked by the region’s local elites. 
• Fear and looting in Krasnodar: Recent weeks marked another high-profile corruption case in the Krasnodar Territory, this time involving Andrei Korobka, the region’s former deputy governor in charge of agriculture. The prosecution alleges Korobka awarded land leases without competitive tender and directed state contracts to affiliated structures, enriching them, and that some agricultural land was converted to commercial development. His alleged partners were regional deputies Sergei Fursa and Alexei Sidyukov. The cadastral value of his listed assets, which will now be seized, exceeds 10 billion rubles; their market value is likely much higher, making it a particularly notable corruption case. Korobka’s case is only the latest in a long series of corruption cases and arrests in the region, which has seen the detention of several high-ranking officials over the past year, including two other deputy governors. In Russia’s domestic press the Krasnodar Territory cases have been held up as an example of tighter law enforcement in the provinces, and a signal to regional elites who have excessively enriched themselves over the past decades that the rules of the game are changing. 
• Making up numbers? There is an increasing and increasingly visible anxiety about the state of the economy among both officials and figures in the private sector. Vladimir Putin himself questioned the government twice over the past month about lagging economic growth, in spite of the positive effects of the Strait of Hormuz crisis on Russia’s budget. Minister of economic development Maxim Reshetnikov made an unusually candid public statement, suggesting that Russia’s economic reserves have largely been exhausted, and the macroeconomic situation is significantly more complex than in recent years. Vladimir Boglaev, the director of the Cherepovets Foundry and Mechanical Plant accused the federal government of having “lost touch” with economic reality. The series of examples could go on – what makes them remarkable is their openness, as an increasing number of political and business leaders think that it is OK or even necessary to make these remarks in the public space, suggesting growing frustration and inability to get input across to the government and the Kremlin. They also came at the same time as claims from the head of Swedish Military Intelligence, who told the Financial Times that Russia was engaged in systematic falsification of economic statistics to create the impression that its economy is successfully managing sanctions and war expenditures. Nilsson, for example, cited real inflation as close to 15% versus Rosstat’s official 5.87% in March, although it is unclear where the date came from. The Russian authorities have indeed greatly restricted the publication of certain data series over the past years, and Rosstat has changed the methodology of calculating certain social indicators. However, there has been no evidence of the authorities systematically falsifying economic data. 
• Making up the numbers: The authorities seem to be resorting to increasingly desperate measures to address the drop in military recruitment, which was around 20 percent in the first three months of the year, according to Janis Kluge, based on regional budget data. Universities are now subject to informal 2% recruitment quotas for male students (as reported by Farida Rustamova), while the military-industrial complex has siphoned thousands of civilian drone specialists. Social media posts from the Kemerovo Region suggest institutional pressure on students to sign contracts with the Defense Ministry or become drone operators. This drain on human capital is exacerbating the negative effects of a historically low unemployment rate, which Central Bank governor Elvira Nabiullina warned was a ceiling on any potential economic growth as there are little capacity gains to make without significant technological upgrades. 
• Great expectations: Putin took part in the third “Small Homeland — The Strength of Russia” forum of municipalities in April, which set a number of goals for municipal development in the next few years, such as: the annexed Ukrainian regions must reach average Russian-level indicators by 2030; gasification in the regions should reach 85 percent; utility tariff growth must be more strictly controlled. These targets may seem somewhat ambitious, but these are mostly previous goals being restated after the government failed to reach them by the previous deadline. For example, the gasification target was already set by Putin in 2020 (when the government envisaged “completing” the task by 2024) and has been repeatedly reaffirmed since without being met, with only marginal progress over the past six years. The 2030 parity goal for the occupied territories mirrors targets set in the 2023 socioeconomic development plans for them. As regards the rather vague goal about tariff control, this contradicts the government’s own two-stage tariff indexation plan for 2026 (up to 22% in some regions from October even as residents in many regions have already been complaining about excessive tariff growth since the beginning of the year) . Similarly, development goals for the Far East, adopted by the government this week, reflect declining ambitions: a 2017 strategy foresaw a population growth for Far Eastern regions of 2 million people by 2024, which did not pan out as population figures continued declining; in a 2020 development strategy the government planned to reconstruct 40 airports in the Far East by 2035 – now the plan is to have 25 by 2036; a goal of creating 450,000 jobs was effectively reduced to 310,000 in the new strategy, etc. Nothing new under the sun – only, sometimes, the goalposts.