Putin built an Iron Dome for his palace. The rest of Russia can burn

That morning, Voronezh Gov. Alexander Gusev reported 113 Ukrainian drones downed over his region overnight, 70 of them over the city itself. At least three people were killed and 39 were injured.On Sunday, Radio Liberty’s Russian service reported, citing satellite imagery, that 16 new air-defense towers went up in October within 50 kilometers of Vladimir Putin’s residence at Valdai, bringing the total to more than 50. In April, it had counted 27. Fewer than 100,000 people live inside that circle. Moscow and its region, home to more than 20 million, have built only about twice as many since the invasion. In December 2022, Putin promised “a safe life for all our citizens” across Russia. PUTIN GOT A DIESEL ORDER. TRUMP GOT THE CALENDAROn Monday afternoon, as Voronezh counted its dead, former President Dmitry Medvedev declared that Russia “has stood and still stands” and is “developing, even under the pressure” of more than 30,000 sanctions.Anyone who has worked in counterintelligence learns to watch what a regime protects, not what it says. By that measure, the Kremlin has stopped hiding its priorities. It is hardening what it values and handing the bill to everyone else.The fortress Between Oct. 8 and 11, Ukrainian drones hit three data centers run by Yandex, Russia’s largest technology company, and days later attacked Sberbank and VK sites. The state’s answer is to dig: Digital Development Minister Maksut Shadaev says new sites will go in “deepened” locations or far away. And since Aug. 24, as I noted in these pages in September, a presidential decree has allowed the government to impose temporary management on critical-infrastructure facilities deemed inadequately protected, including against drones.The state is hardening its grip as well. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s internet regulator, wants children identified on social networks. On Monday, one of its officials made the case to a Duma committee via video, with a portrait of Stalin behind her, and complained that the law does not let the agency block everything it considers destructive.And it is hardening its fist. On Oct. 22, Andrei Voloshin, a 42-year-old taxi driver in Yekaterinburg, went to a police station to retrieve a phone seized in an earlier case over two social media comments about the army. He was detained on his way out in a treason case, a crime punishable by up to life in prison. According to the independent outlet Mediazona, he was beaten and choked with plastic bags.Meanwhile, the man at the top has stopped explaining himself. Article 84 of Russia’s constitution provides for an annual presidential address to the Federal Assembly. Putin last gave one in February 2024, two weeks before his reelection. In August, his envoy to the Duma suggested dropping the annual requirement: it is “not the time and not the tasks.” On Oct. 25, the Kremlin said there would be no address this year either. Putin had never before skipped two years in a row.The bill The bill shows up first in the hospitals. According to the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Vasily Akimkin, director of the Central Research Institute of Epidemiology at Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s public health watchdog, has said that the country’s HIV epidemic has reached the generalized stage in 27 regions, meaning that more than 1% of pregnant women there test positive. In the worst-hit regions, including Kemerovo, Irkutsk, and Sverdlovsk, about 2% of residents live with the virus. Only half of Russians living with HIV have a suppressed viral load, according to the same institute. In 2025, outbreaks of blood-borne infections in medical facilities reached a 15-year high.The independent outlet IStories found that 19 of 82 regions cut planned healthcare spending by at least 10% for 2026, a wartime record. Irkutsk and Kemerovo cut by more than 30%. Kemerovo also froze construction of its regional infectious diseases hospital due to a lack of money: planned spending fell from $6.4 million (524 million rubles) in 2025 to $39,000 (3.2 million rubles) in 2026. In February, the same region cut its own payment to the family of a soldier killed in the war from 3 million rubles to 1 million. The new Duma’s 450 members, meanwhile, hold 44.4 billion rubles in the bank, more than the annual budgets of six Russian regions, Vedomosti calculated.The money None of this is an accident of mismanagement. It is arithmetic.In the first nine months of 2026, Russia’s federal deficit stood at $64 billion, or 5.2 trillion rubles, against a budgeted $46.8 billion, or 3.8 trillion rubles, for the entire year. The Finance Ministry now expects $90 billion, or 7.3 trillion rubles, Reuters reported. Oil and gas revenues fell 22% year over year in September. The liquid part of the National Wealth Fund, Russia’s rainy-day fund, has shrunk to about $45 billion. The value-added tax rose to 22% this year.The central bank held its key rate at 14% on Oct. 23 and now expects inflation to end the year between 7.1% and 7.6%. The Economic Development Ministry projects growth of just 0.6%. In July, the state pollster VTsIOM found that two-thirds of Russians believe the hardest times are still ahead, as many as when the Soviet Union collapsed.Even the money that buys soldiers is thinning. Regions are cutting enlistment bonuses, and economist Janis Kluge estimates that about 234,000 people signed contracts from January through August, down from about 260,000 a year earlier.The friends Russia’s friends are thinning out, too. On Oct. 25, Serbia’s Student List defeated the coalition of Aleksandar Vucic, the Putin-endorsed strongman, 52.7% to 39.2%, according to preliminary official results. Yet the winners had promised to keep refusing sanctions on Russia. Moscow did not lose Serbia. It lost its man in Serbia.China is taking more than it gives. Russian defense suppliers are moving production into China, a report released Oct. 22 by the Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies found, including the sanctioned Element group, Russia’s largest microelectronics maker, which began assembling chipsets there in 2024. Beijing, the researchers noted, appears to limit cooperation that does not serve its own technological ambitions. Since 2023, China has required its official maps to add, in parentheses, the historical Chinese names of eight places in Russia’s Far East: Haishenwai for Vladivostok, Boli for Khabarovsk. Beijing makes no formal territorial claim. It simply keeps the file open.The lever On Oct. 9, President Donald Trump announced that Russia would supply diesel to American and global markets, and the Trump Treasury Department licensed Russian diesel imports until April 7, 2027. I argued in these pages that the outrage over that deal ignored its critics’ double standards. That argument stands. But the deal also revealed something about the seller.In July, amid shortages, Moscow banned diesel exports outright. On the day of the deal, it moved to lift the ban; Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak later said refineries had nowhere to store the surplus. Russian drivers pay about 87 rubles a liter for diesel, up from 74 a year ago. On Oct. 22, Kommersant reported that the government is leaning toward another increase in pump prices, because the fuel Russia now imports sells at a loss of 13 to 18 rubles a liter. That is not the behavior of a state flush with options. It is the behavior of a state that needs cash more than it needs gratitude.A PUTIN CRITIC FOUND THE METHOD IN TRUMP’S MADNESS. THEN HE BLAMED IT ON OILThe license is a lever. It permits deals in Russian diesel that U.S. sanctions would otherwise bar. It expires on April 7. Licenses can be renewed. They can also be allowed to lapse.A regime that rings a country house with 50 towers while one of its regions has frozen work on an infectious diseases hospital has told us what it protects. A regime that talks of burying its servers while its arms suppliers move production to China has told us what it fears. A system in which a region cuts what it pays the families of its dead has told us what it can afford.Washington does not need to guess. It only needs to read.Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he held senior positions in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.