I might disappoint some readers with the main topic of today’s dispatch, especially after such a long hiatus, but this has been a hobby horse of mine for some time, so buckle up. In today’s dispatch I am going to take a glance at Russia’s waste management reform, which was recently updated by the federal government, and explain what it tells us about policymaking constraints in wartime Russia and why this is important.

Years wasted on the waste reform

In March 2025 the federal government announced changes to the waste management reform, which originally started in 2019 and was roughly halfway through its planned implementation. A review thus seemed justified – but it was also preceded by a series of damning critical remarks from unusually high places. Valentina Matvienko, the head of the Federation Council had stated in December that the reform was a failure. Former United Russia supremo Andrey Turchak (now in the somewhat diminished position of Altai Republic governor) said the same about the reform specifically in his region. Viktoria Abramchenko, a United Russia deputy who as deputy prime minister had been responsible for the implementation of the reform, called Siberian regions specifically problematic. The government mouthpiece Rossiyskaya Gazeta printed the same about the Far East. Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov singled out several regions in the Federation Council, highlighting the poor implementation of the reform in these territories. The upper chamber of the parliament held an audit, which found that the reform suffered from several shortcomings, including a shortage of container spaces and specialized equipment.

The thunderous condemnation of the failures of the reform are, to a large extent, due to these high officials trying to look busy when there is little else to do, and of course also to push political responsibility for a politically risky failure as far away from them as possible. But the reform does seem to be a spectacular policy failure. When it was launched in 2019, its main goals included making waste management across Russia more efficient, cleaner and greener by reducing the number of both legal and illegal landfills (by ensuring that no more than 50% of municipal waste ends up in these), standardizing waste management practices, sorting 100% of municipal waste by 2030 and incentivizing recycling. It is unlikely that any of these will happen, and Russians are noticing it. A survey carried out by the pro-Putin organization “People’s Front” last year showed that 30% of Russians thought the problems with waste management actually got worse, with an additional 27% having seen no positive change at all. Only 34% saw any positive developments. The reform envisaged the creation of 868 waste management plants by 2030; in 2019-24, only 250 were commissioned, of which 64 waste disposal and 34 waste processing plants. Even according to official statistics, which are questionable, only 53% of household waste is sorted, and at least 80% – but likely more – ends up in landfills.

Mostly based on the criticism articulated by Matvienko (and Turchak), the new rules announced in March singled out so-called regional operators. These enterprises – 182 of them as of 2024 – were created by the 2019 reform to act as intermediaries between residents, local authorities and the various waste management companies involved in the collection, transportation and processing of municipal waste. Several regions did indeed change operators over the past years as the Federal Antimonopoly Service found various violations, and it became obvious that the regions are not meeting the benchmarks of the reform. The government will also roll out a controversial new system of calculating waste removal fees – based on living area – in the whole of Russia.

But the shortcomings are more than just the result of neglectful implementation. The design of the reform was flawed from the very start: while waste collection fees went up considerably and often in an untransparent manner as regions created politically protected quasi-monopolies, the rules did very little to incentivize residents or companies to use recyclable packaging or invest in new technologies, focusing instead on building new plants, such as waste incinerators, even though existing ones were underutilized. Sectoral experts – interviewed, for instance, by Kedr, an independent news site focusing on environmental pollution – highlighted unjustifiable intermediary fees, subcontractors cutting corners and falsified reporting. Newly created landfills, often the cheapest way for operators to get rid of household waste – have attracted the ire of residents in many regions.

The new rules will essentially tighten the requirements for regional operators. In future, their contracts can be terminated if they violate the agreement on the frequency of waste removal more than five times. They will be responsible for maintaining container sites, which often look like waste dumps themselves. Using satellite technology, the authorities will try to monitor garbage trucks more, to prevent them from dumping their loads in illegal landfills. The newly adopted law also aims to uniformize waste sorting across Russia by 2030.

Perhaps these updates (and others that are planned) will have some positive effects by improving service. But it is obvious that the problem is much deeper than this. In fact, the waste reform bears all the signs of policy that was flawed from the onset, but became much more hopeless due to the full-scale war.

The labor shortages exacerbated by the war have led to a shortage of truck drivers that waste management companies rely on (with vacancies increasing by almost 50% last year), and driven up salaries faster than in any other profession. Anti-migrant policies adopted in the wake of terrorist attacks in 2024 exacerbated this issue further – in several regions the first type of public service to face a collapse after anti-migrant campaigns started was waste collection. Buying and maintaining equipment have also become more difficult. Due to import restrictions, specialized trucks themselves have become more difficult to import and repair. Sanctions also affected companies’ plans to import and implement foreign waste management technology (even though the authorities claim that the sector’s dependence on imports was half of what it used to be before the war). Prior to 2020, Rostec had planned to build five incinerators using technology from the Japanese Hitachi company. So far only one has been completed. High inflation and the associated high key rate of the Central Bank disincentivized investments and made cost overruns, which had been a constant feature of the reform, both more common and more dangerous. Even the war-related boom in domestic tourism seems to have had some – albeit comparatively minor – negative effects on the sector, as it led to a previously unforeseen increase in household waste in a handful of regions.  

Apart from the genuine benefit of having created a domestic waste recycling industry, weak as it is, one could note that the only way in which the reform worked as it was intended is that it shifted responsibility from the federal to regional governments: in the 2024 survey 54% said that they were dissatisfied with regional officials for their lack of results in the field of waste management. The rules adopted in March also reflect this way of thinking. The costs of cleaning up “accumulated harm” will fall on regional budgets. Deputy prime minister Dmitry Patrushev, who now oversees the reform, also mentioned that “extrabudgetary funds” would have to be found to accelerate the implementation; in practice, this means that governors will have to pressure local businesses to pull their weight.

More money for governors

By a presidential decree, Vladimir Putin substantially increased the salaries of regional governors, equalizing their status with deputy prime ministers from January 2026 on. This means that governors will be entitled to monthly and quarterly cash incentives and – while we don’t know exactly, since to the Russian government has been withholding data on the salaries of public officials – according to the sources of Farida Rustamova, the rise in compensation could be tenfold, from 150-200 thousand rubles per month to 1.2-1.3 million.

Of course, no one should be fooled into believing that most governors really only live on this relatively meager sum. Similarly to other high-profile jobs in public administration in Russia, governors have ample opportunities to engage in the practice of kormlenie: essentially, extracting various material benefits from business actors and other residents of their region. The increased salaries are likely not going to eliminate this. However, they could imply that the security services will have a freer hand to crack down on former governors and their appointees if they do engage in corrupt practices. Recent cases include Alexey Smirnov of Kursk (implicated in the corruption case related to faulty defensive structures) and Vasily Golubev of Rostov, who reportedly became a person of interest in corruption cases related to infrastructure projects in his region, even as he presciently (and quickly) secured a seat in the Federation Council after his dismissal. Both Golubev and Smirnov had local roots in their region, but the recently dismissed governor of the Sverdlovsk Region, Yevgeny Kuyvashev, was an outsider, belonging to the circle of Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin – and he may reportedly also face a corruption investigation.

This is also happening at a time when governors are expected to take on a number of new, politically sensitive responsibilities, from keeping prices low and recruiting contract soldiers, to increasing fertility in their region, all while the promise of upwards mobility that has been central to the Kremlin’s personnel policy of rotating centrally educated, technocratic cadres, has become increasingly difficult to implement in practice. I have written about this more extensively in my latest report for the Foreign Policy Research institute, but in short: while the majority of Russia’s governors are now part of this technocratic cohort (and the Kremlin has started to expand the system to municipalities as well), avenues of promotion have become more difficult to find after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine due to an altogether more conservative personnel policy, growing uncertainties about property rights and political influence, and the need to share positions with novel groups, such as war participants or retiring security officials. A natural reaction to this development would be officials trying to build mutually beneficial relationships with local business and security elites – something that the Kremlin is probably trying to avoid.

Also-happeneds

• Mayoral elections in Kursk and Kurgan: shortly before the detainment of Alexey Smirnov, the former governor of the Kursk Region, the mayor of Kursk, Igor Kutsak also resigned, officially of his own volition. Kutsak had been mayor of the city since February 2022, after heading the region’s property management committee. While Alexander Khinshtein, the new governor appointed in December last year claimed that he tried to “dissuade” the mayor (even after publicly reprimanding him for slippery streets during the winter), the resignation will actually allow Khinshtein to pick his own candidate to manage the city. This will happen likely later this year, after Khinshtein himself is duly elected governor, in a procedure over which, due to the new municipal administration reform, the governor’s office will likely have a larger influence over both the appointment and the eventual dismissal of the new mayor. The new mayor could reportedly be Khinshtein’s deputy, which would fit into the general trend of governors considering the mayor of the regional capital a member of their team, even – increasingly often – bringing in outsiders to manage these cities. It is possible that the election of the mayor of Kurgan – already postponed three times since early 2024 and now scheduled for April 23 – will be pushed back again for the same reason, even though a “competition committee” has already picked two potential candidates for an assembly vote.
• Lena bridge reloaded: the federal government now thinks that the Lena Bridge, linking Yakutsk to the federal highway system, will be built by 2028. There is reason to doubt this prediction, however, given the government’s earlier record on the project. The construction of the bridge was famously suspended in 2014 when the government reallocated funds previously earmarked for the bridge to the then recently occupied Crimea, even downplaying the importance of the year-round road accessibility of this important regional capital. The project was going to restart in 2020, but the COVID pandemic and later the full-scale war took priority, with construction starting only in October 2024, allowing the nonexistent bridge to become somewhat of a symbol of how the war took precedence over infrastructure development.  
• Maria Ponomarenko’s inhumane treatment: when it comes to the issue of human rights, there is no shortage of depressing stories from across Russia each week. A particularly bad case is that of Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist of the RusNews news site from the Altai Territory, who in April 2022 was one of the first journalists to be imprisoned for violating the wartime law criminalizing the “spreading of fake news about the Russian army”, after she posted publicly about Russia’s bombing of Ukrainian civilians in Mariupol. Ponomarenko has recently started a hunger strike to protest the inhumane treatment, to which she has been subjected. In late March, speaking in front of a court where she stood accused of attacking prison personnel – carrying a possible sentence of two years on top of the six she was sentenced to in 2023 – she spoke about her treatment, the plight of human rights in Russia in general, but also about how she had become absolutely sure of Russia’s responsibility for bombing the Mariupol Drama Theater. It is worth a read. Russian courts passed 82 verdicts in cases related to “army fakes” in 2024. This is just one of the many criminal articles threatening journalists in Russia; journalists working for regional publications are especially vulnerable, given that they are usually not high profile enough either to avoid arrest or to be considered for a prisoner exchange.
• Campaign in Irkutsk: the Communist Party will support former governor (now Duma deputy) Sergey Levchenko in the September gubernatorial election against the incumbent Igor Kobzev. Levchenko, who was forced to resign in 2019 after Putin criticized him for the handling of devastating floods in the region, put the return of direct mayoral elections in Irkutsk into the focus of his campaign. Due to the recent adoption of the municipal public administration reform, this would require the amendment of a federal law, which Levchenko can hardly guarantee. Either way, he is unlikely to return as governor: even if he passes the so-called “municipal filter” – which usually allows the governing United Russia to block nomination of gubernatorial candidates via local assemblies – it is highly unlikely that he will be a serious threat to Kobzev. However, the elevation of the issue of direct mayoral elections itself highlights that the erosion of local democratic institutions continues to be an important concern in cities. Moreover, for the Communist Party the September elections are much more about the party’s ongoing struggle to survive as a relevant political machinery than anything else – reflecting its demotion in the 2023 and 2024 regional votes. For this purpose, supporting candidates with relatively good name recognition in politically problematic regions to test the extent of the Kremlin’s control over election infrastructure, may now seem like the best bet.
• Rare earths in Siberia: the federal government announced its intention to create an industrial cluster in Siberia to mine and process rare earth metals, of which the macroregion is estimated to hold 18 percent of Russia’s reserves. Earlier, Rosatom announced plans to establish an integrated supply chain for rare earth magnets, used in defense production and other high technology sectors; industry experts have expressed skepticism about the project’s profitability, but due to Russia’s push for technological sovereignty, it is not unlikely that the federal budget will keep supporting the project. But apart from this, focusing on rare earth metal mining right now also has immediate political value for the Kremlin, as Putin himself identified it as a potential area for US-Russia cooperation, having noted Donald Trump’s sudden interest in these minerals. Others are also trying to use the focus on rare earth metals for political gains: Igor Kobzev, the governor of the Irkutsk Region told deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Patrushev that significantly more work could be carried out on deposits in his regions, if it were not suffering from electricity shortages.
• United Russia “primaries”: the ruling party has launched its “primaries” to select candidates for this year’s regional elections. The votes are, in most cases, of course are held just to provide the veneer of intra-party democracy to an otherwise closely controlled selection process. However, given that United Russia is supposed to be one of the main vehicles for war participants to become public officials, it is worth keeping an eye on at least this aspect of the selection process. As it happens, out of roughly 16,000 potential candidates, only 319 are war participants, more or less in line with last year. On the one hand, war participants have been actively promoted to various unelected positions over the past year – and most mobilized and contract soldiers are still in Ukraine – this also suggests that the lack of enthusiasm among existing party members for sharing positions with people possessing a war participant badge has not changed. Stories about individual conflicts are also still popping up with some regularity, and their number is expected to grow if and when soldiers indeed return from Ukraine.