Putin has Made Governors Targets of Popular Anger and Their Spending on Body Guards has Almost Doubled since 2022, ‘Vedomosti’ Reports

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 9 – Vladimir Putin has sought to deflect popular anger away from himself and onto the governors of the Russian Federation’s federal subjects by making the latter responsible for carrying out many of his most unpopular policies. That has prompted the governors to almost double their spending on body guards, Vedomosti reports.

            In 2021, the Russian newspaper reports, the Russian authorities in the countries regions and republics were prepared to spend 59.7 million rubles for the governors’ body guards, a figure that rose to 119.7 million rubles in 2023 before falling back slightly to 112.4 million rubles last year (vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2026/02/09/1174866-s-nachala-spetsoperatsii-gubernatori-stali-bolshe-tratitsya-na-ohranu

            Those figures cover only bids for contracts on body guard services and thus do not include the spending for regular police or special forces that also are involved in protecting the heads of the federal subjects. But they do show that governors are worried about their own security, a fear likely to have risen given that Putin has made them executors of many policies.

            Putin’s effort to ensure that any anger Russians feel about policies is directed not at him and his regime but at the governors has been much discussed especially since he launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022. What these figures show is that this has made the governors nervous, and they are doing what they can to ensure that no attack on them succeeds.