As the world’s largest country that spans eleven time zones and shares land borders with fourteen countries, Russia’s geography has always posed a difficult problem for government: how to maintain economic activity, infrastructure and basic services across an enormous territory with a highly uneven population.

More than four and a half years of war against Ukraine, sanctions and disrupted international connections have made that challenge considerably harder.

One place where the response to these mounting pressures is becoming visible is Russia’s national spatial policy.

In my newly published research with Anton Gorodnichev, we compare Russia’s 2019 and 2024 spatial development strategies and trace a substantial change in how the state approaches territorial planning. These strategies render Russia’s political choices visible: which places are expected to grow, which should be supported, and for what purpose.

In 2019, national spatial policy centred on 41 large urban agglomerations, expected to drive economic growth nationwide. Five years later, the new strategy identified 2,160 “support settlements” spread across the country, with a task of retaining population, providing essential services and maintaining territorial continuity. The challenge of governing a vast and uneven territory did not disappear. What changed was the government’s idea of what spatial policy should achieve.

When big cities were the answer

Russia’s 2019 strategy belonged to an era when concentrating people and economic activity in large,........

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