Hard-Pressed Orenburg Oblast Turns to Better-Off Nizhny Novgorod for Money to Pay Bonuses to Those Signing Up for the Russian Army

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 6 – The governments of Russia’s poorer regions find themselves in a bind: Moscow rates them on their ability to get men to sign up for service in the military but neither leaves enough tax money in the regional government’s pockets to pay or returns enough in subsidies to allow them to compete with better off regions.

            Now, one poor region, Orenburg, has come up with a solution of sorts. It has borrowed money from wealthier Nizhny Novgorod Oblast so that it can get enough men to sign up so as to avoid problems with Moscow (storage.googleapis.com/istories/stories/2026/02/06/rossiiskii-region-vpervie-poprosil-dengi-na-viplati-kontraktnikam-u-drugogo-subekta-rf/index.html).

            According to the Important Stories portal, this is a first; but it does recall the arrangements of the first decades of Soviet power when better-off oblasts were required to help their poorer counterparts -- although the new arrangement has potentially more serious consequences because the regions themselves and not Moscow are behind it.

             The portal’s Sonya Savina says that Nizhny Novgorod in December 2025 transferred to Orenburg 400 million rubles (six million US dollars) to pay for 1,000 bonuses that the poorer oblast had agreed to pay to men who had signed up in the last quarter of that year but did not have the cash on hand to do so.

            Aleksandra Prokopenko, an expert on Russian politics and economics, says that this arrangement resembles “a ‘horizontal’ subsidy in which the expenditure obligations of one budget are covered by another,” an arrangement that was legalized by Moscow in August 2019 but that hasn’t been reported being used except for cooperative projects like bridges.

            “If the goals correspond to the powers of the recipient region, and the Nizhny Novgorod region has sufficient budget funds for this, the parties conclude an agreement with clearly defined conditions: what exactly the funds can be spent on, within what time frame, what results need to be achieved, and how to report,” the expert says.

In this case, Orenburg won’t have to return the funds to Nizhny Novgorod unless the former violates the terms of its agreement with the latter.  That is very unusual, Prokopenko says. “Usually regions do not finance each other’s expenses;” and she adds that she doesn’t think this was “an initiative” by Nizhny Novgorod.

Rather, she suggests, it may well be “one of the ways [for Moscow] to solve the problem at a regional level without allocating additional funds from the federal budget.” Prokopenko is probably correct in that, but the Orenburg-Nizhny Novgorod lash up may open the way to kinds of cooperation among regions that could lessen rather than increase central control.

Both History and Current Problems Behind High Rates of Recidivism and Violent Crime in Urals Region, Russian Police Say

Paul Goble     

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Federal subjects in the Urals region of the Russian Federation lead that country in terms of both recidivism and violent crime, a pattern police say reflects the presence of so many people who were sent to the GULAG as well as their descendants and rapidly intensifying social problems, including the widespread availability of guns.

            The Russian interior ministry has released figures on recidivism rates and violent crime in the federal subjects of the Russian Federation. The oblasts and krays of the enormous Urals Federal District lead the country in both rankings, the data show, often by wide margins (svpressa.ru/society/article/501426/).

            The explanation for this pattern is simple, current and former MVD officials there say. On the one hand, they say, the presence in the region’s population of many who were dispatched to the GULAG or otherwise deported and later to prison camps means a large portion of the population suffers from grievances and is used to viewing law enforcement as the enemy.

            On the other, they say, the region has a high rate of gun ownership because so many trophy guns have ended up there, something that has intensified in recent years, and is suffering from increasing poverty and even more from a widening gap between the wealthiest and the poorest elements of society, characteristics that feed grievance and violence as well.

            What is a particular problem, one former MVD officer says, is that those who have been released from prisons in recent years typically remain unemployed. According to data from 2025, “more than 60 percent of former inmates remain unemployed in the course of the first year after they are released.” Such people often turn to crime to make ends meet.

Russian Intelligence Targeting Svalbard and Finmark, Using Russian Crews on Foreign-Flagged Vessels to Do So, Norwegian Police Security Service Warns

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 6 – In its annual report on security challenges, Norway’s Police Security Service warns that Russian intelligence is targeting Svalbard, an archipelago that belongs to Norway, and Finmark, the northern portion of Norway, and using Russian crews on foreign-flagged vessels to do so.

            The report says that Moscow’s actions include “cyber and influence operations, sabotage, recruitment of human sources, evasion of sanctions and export control regulations as well as security-threatening economic measures” (pst.no/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Nasjonal-trusselvurdering-2026.pdf discussed at thebarentsobserver.com/security/police-russian-crew-members-pose-a-significant-espionage-threat/444849).

            “To hide” what it is doing, Moscow is using civilian vessels and especially “Russian crews on board civilian vessels registered in a third country.” These pose “a significant threat within the sphere of cover maritime intelligence in 2026,” the Police Security Service warns in its report. 

            According to the PST, “Russian intelligence and security services are active throughout Norway,” but it notes that “the northernmost counties and Svalbard are of particular interest and therefore particularly exposed to intelligence and influence activities. This applies, among other things, to the border areas in Finmark and the Russian presence in Svalbard."

            This new PST report provides the most detailed documentation in the public domain about Russian intelligence operations in Svalbard and the ways in which they may presage a Russian move against NATO there. (For background on this posssibility, see jamestown.org/moscows-first-move-against-nato-could-take-place-in-norways-svalbard-archipelago/ and jamestown.org/moscow-using-svalbard-to-test-natos-readiness-and-resolve/.)

Power to Tax is Power to Destroy, and Moscow is Now Deploying It Against Aboriginal Peoples

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Until last year, non-Russian peoples in the far north and far east were not charged taxes on the land where they practiced their traditional ways of life, such as pastures for reindeer herding and the like. But in 2024, Moscow changed the tax code; and at the end of 2025, these communities were faced with tax bills they couldn’t pay.

            The full impact of the new arrangement is yet to be felt, because the authorities aren’t charging taxes on land if it is in a traditional place as defined by the powers but are if these land plots are beyond the borders of those areas, according to Tatyana Britskaya, an investigative journalist for Novaya Gazeta (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2026/02/06/chernye-vezhniki).

            In Sakha, she says, officials have defined as “traditional” only places where people actually live and not where they herd animals. That means that only four of 37 land plots the indigenous peoples view as their own are “exempt from tax.” The other 34 “have to pay several million rubles a year for reindeer pastures,” a completely “impossible sum.”

            What this is intended to do, Britskaya says, is to allow the officials to restrict the amount of land that the indigenous peoples can actually call their own without declaring any change in internal borders and thereby open the way to the exploitation of land they in fact have used from times immemorial to development by Russian mining interests.

            What these means is that many indigenous peoples will find that the state has confiscated the lands they need to continue to practice their traditional way of life; and when they give that up, the state will then hand the land over to Russian corporations, which will complete the destruction of these nations.

            The Russian authorities can and undoubtedly will present the new tax arrangements as a matter of simple justice. After all, if other groups use land, they have to pay taxes on it. But in this case, the power to tax is the power to destroy – and with this new tax arrangement, Moscow has accelerated the demise of the numerically smallest peoples of the north and far east. 

‘Daptar’ Portal Launches Bulletin on Femicide in the North Caucasus

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 6 – A dozen years ago, the Mothers of Dagestan for Human Rights organization launched what it described as “the first Internet resource devoted to the problems of Dagestani women” (kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/237901/). In the intervening period, it has expanded its focus on the status of women across the North Caucasus.

            For many stories about this topic, the Daptar portal is the only reliable source; and over the past decade it has achieved some victories against those there who oppress women. But mostly, it has simply chronicled what is going on. Windows on Eurasia has often relied on it to discuss what is happening in the North Caucasus.

            Despite Daptar’s efforts, he tragedies large and small the women of the traditional societies of the North Caucasus suffer because of the attitudes of men and the rulers of these republics both locally and in Moscow that it has chronicled when few others do have only increased in number since 2012. 

            To expand its coverage and protect more women in that region, the Daptar staff has launched a new bullet devoted to the continuing femicide there. Its first issue has now been posted at the Daptar portal side (daptar.ru/2026/02/06/byulleten-daptara-femicid-prodolzhaetsya/).

            Among the stories it features are the following; a Dagestani mullah kills his second wife, rights activists are seeking to get Georgia to investigate kidnaping of a Chechen woman and her forcible removal to Russia, Ingush courts quash charges against a local woman who fled violence for supposedly stealing money, and a Dagestani has been sentenced to eight years in prison upon returning from Syria.

Almost Half of Muslims in Russan Federation At Present want to Have Three or More Children, More than Double the Share of Ethnic Russians who Do

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – Fertility rates have been falling among Muslim nationalities in the Russian Federation just as they have been among traditionally Orthodox Christian ones, but it is still the case, experts say, that nearly half of all Muslins in that country want their families to have three or more children, more than double the share of ethnic Russians. 

            While that does not mean that all the Muslims who do will achieve that goal, it strongly suggests that the Muslim nations of the Russian Federation will have more large families and thus form an ever larger share of the population of that country in the future, especially given the demographic decline of the ethnic Russians.

            That is just one of the findings reported by the Russian Orthodox Church’s Mercy portal in an article explicitly intended to dispel many of the myths about large families that now circulate in that country (miloserdie.ru/article/mnogodetnye-v-rossii-ih-pochti-3-milliona-semej-no-o-nih-vse-eshhe-ochen-malo-znayut/).

            Among the most noteworthy of the portal’s findings are the following:

·       There are now more large families now than there were only a few years ago, 2.9 million as against 1.1 million in 2013, because families with two or more children have been giving birth to 30 percent of all children, while those with fewer or none have been giving birth to smaller shares.

·       Data on families with children are unreliable because until last year the regions were allowed to set the rules for which families were counted as being large. In Kamchatka, only families with five children were counted as large; in the Far North, those with just two; and other regions set different ages to which the families had to raise their children in order to be counted.

·       Russian families have three or more children for a variety of reasons, ranging from desires and plans to accidental pregnancies that lead to an increase in the number of children.

·       Every third Russian family with three or more children is poor, and, according to the portal, “the more children, the higher the risk that the family will be in that income group.

·       A small but growing group of families with three or more children is to be found among richer parents.

·       Psychological studies have found that people in families without any children or who have three or more feel better about themselves than do families with one or two offspring.

Sexual Violence Cases Tripled over Last Year in Russia's Belgorod Oblast Neighboring Ukraine

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 5 – The Russian interior ministry has reported that sexual violence rose sharply in Belgorod Oblast, which is on the border with Ukraine and where there are many Russian soldiers involved with Putin’s war in Ukraine, in 2022 and 2023, fell slightly in 2024 and then tripled in 2025.

            This trend has attracted widespread attention from independent Russian media (verstka.media/belgorodskaya-oblast-lider-sredi-regionov-rossii-po-chislu-iznasilovanij-v-2025-godu, meduza.io/feature/2026/02/05/belgorodskaya-oblast-lider-po-chislu-zaregistrirovannyh-iznasilovaniy and t.me/tochno_st/752).

            But the Russian government has stopped publishing the data that would be needed to make a definitive diagnosis of why this is happening. Detailed statistics about sexual violence cases stopped being published in 2022, conviction data ended in 2024, and court rulings in such cases are classified and unavailable to researchers.

            The independent researchers say that it is likely that the amount of sexual violence in Belgorod is related to the fact that there are a disproportionate number of Russian men who are being prepared for combat in Ukraine. But they acknowledge that this can’t be conclusively proved because there have not been similar increases in such crimes in other border regions.

            Regional government experts suggest that the rise in numbers over the last several decades there what they call “multi-episode crimes,” such as abuse within families that often a continues for a long time (media.mvd.ru/files/application/5422615). But that explanation calls attention to the fact that many of the victims of such crimes in Belgorod.

            Indeed, according to interior ministry sources, 42 percent of the victims of such crimes were children, a figure that rose to 66 percent in 2023, the first full year of Putin’s expanded war and the last for which such data are available (media.mvd.ru/files/application/5958851). However that may be, many will blame the war for this rise and fear the return of veterans.