Russians are Going to Lose More Rights and Opportunities in 2026, ‘Vyorstka’ Journalists Say

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 7 –The editors of the independent Vyorstka news portal asked their journalists to predict what rights and opportunities ordinary Russians are likely to lose over the next 12 months not only because of Moscow’s increasingly repressive stance but also because budgetary stringency is going to eliminate some highly valued actions Russians value.

            The portal has now published a list of ten such losses that the journalists say are likely given recent trends and the statements and actions of Russian officials and politicians (verstka.media/chego-mogut-lishitsya-rossiyane-v-2026-godu). They include the following:

·       The loss of reliable delivery services as Russian officials seek to limit the role of immigrants and impose more rules on those engaged in this form of economic activity.

·       Fewer streets are going to be cleaned and even fewer roads are going to be repaired because regional governments don’t have the money to do so and they have lost much of the cheap labor of migrants as well.

·       New rules requiring taxi drivers use only domestically produced cars are likely to significantly reduce the number of cabs on the road and thus make this form of transportation far less accessible than it had become.

·       Young Russians will find it harder to get a higher education, not only because of rising tuition but also because secondary schools will be tracking an ever greater percentage of their pupils into non-academic tracks.

·       Moscow will impose ever more restrictions on foreign travel, depriving many Russians of that opportunity. Already, the authorities have put in place limits not only on those in debt or subject to the draft but also those who are in what the government deems “socially important” professions.

·       The Russian government will expand its monitoring of citizens not only online but on the telephone and will put in place more public facial recognition devices to track where Russians are going and what they are doing.

·       Moscow is likely to ban all Google services.

·       Moscow is likely to expand its efforts to block the use of VPNs. It has already banned advertising of such services and its likely to do more in the coming year.

·       Moscow city is likely to impose charges on those who want to drive their cars into the city center; and other urban centers may follow.

·       And to boost the Russian birthrate, the Russian government is likely to make women without children a special category whose members will have be denied a range of government services.

Many of these are not political in the narrow sense, but they will almost certainly be viewed as political by those who fall victim of them.