Russia has been fighting for 12 million hectares of someone else’s land for the fifth year, while abandoning nearly four times as much of its own. The arithmetic of this war explains the Kremlin’s logic more precisely than any of its declarations.
In the Kostroma Region, about 70 percent of arable land has fallen out of agricultural use. The figure comes neither from an opposition report nor from a Western think tank memorandum: it was cited by the Russian Academy of Sciences alongside data for the Yaroslavl Region, where the figure is 64 percent, the Ivanovo Region, 63 percent, and the Vologda Region, about half. These fields are only a few hours’ drive from Moscow. No one is shelling them. No war has to be fought for them. The land here has simply ceased to be of use to anyone.
At the same time, Russia has been waging a war for the fifth year whose objectives have long been measured in square kilometers. It controls roughly 115,000 to 120,000 square kilometers of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory, including Crimea, annexed in 2014. In hectares, that amounts to 11.5 to 12 million. Abandoned Russian arable land alone, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, covers about 20 million hectares. All unused agricultural land in the country totals about 44 million hectares. Nearly four times more than the war has brought.
I am writing these lines in Baku, and I deliberately begin with numbers rather than rhetoric. Moscow produces rhetoric about historic lands on an industrial scale. It releases statistics with growing reluctance, and in the gap between words and numbers, I believe, lies the answer to why a country incapable of developing its own vast territory suddenly needed someone else’s.
The Arithmetic the Kremlin Prefers Not to Calculate
An honest discussion requires an acknowledgment: the numbers here are not simple. Roughly 380 million hectares in Russia are classified as agricultural land, but a substantial share consists of forests, shrubland, and swamps formally assigned to the agricultural land fund. Actual agricultural acreage totals about 222 million hectares. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, approximately 44 million hectares are not being used for their designated purpose. Academic geographers analyzing the same data set arrive at a similar figure, 43.3 million hectares, and note that abandoned farmland is becoming overgrown with grass and shrubs, while about 17 percent of its area is already covered by woody vegetation.
Two independent estimates converge. More important is something else: these are Moscow’s own official figures, not enemy propaganda.
The picture is the same with arable land. In November 2025, Deputy Agriculture Minister Razin reported that an inventory conducted across 51 regions had identified roughly 20 million hectares of unused arable land. Two months earlier, in September 2025, a vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences cited the same figure as of the beginning of 2023 at an international real estate forum and clarified that after land reclamation and agrochemical treatment, about half of it, 10.5 million hectares, could realistically be brought back into use. The rest, apparently, has already been lost to agriculture for decades.
For comparison, Ukraine’s area within its internationally recognized borders is 603,500 square kilometers. Russia controls about one-fifth of it. In other words, the Kremlin has sent hundreds of thousands of people into the trenches for a territory smaller than Russia’s abandoned arable land alone.
At this point, any conscientious author must make a concession. Not all hectares are equal. Kostroma loam, with its short summers and acidic soils, cannot be compared with the black earth of the Zaporizhzhia or Kherson regions. Russia primarily abandoned land that was unprofitable to cultivate, and there is market logic in this: grain is more profitable to grow in Kuban, Stavropol, and the Don region, where major agricultural holdings operate. The country harvests record crops and remains the world’s largest exporter of wheat.
But this concession hurts the Kremlin more than its critics. If land is abundant and grain production is so high that tens of millions of tons are exported, then the war is clearly not being fought for bread. The same vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, incidentally, estimated Russia’s domestic milk deficit at 18.6 million tons. A country that ships wheat to Egypt and Turkey does not produce enough milk for its own table.
One Hundred Fifty Thousand Villages, a Third of Them Already Dead or Dying
Land does not empty by itself. People abandon it.
The 2021 census counted 153,157 rural settlements in Russia. In 24,751 of them, not a single permanent resident remained. Another roughly 23,500 villages and hamlets have no more than six residents. Add the two figures together: nearly 50,000 settlements, almost one-third of rural Russia, have either already disappeared or are only a few funerals away from extinction.
The trend is more frightening than the snapshot. The 2002 census recorded about 13,100 villages with no residents; the 2010 census recorded about 19,400. In nineteen years, the number of dead villages nearly doubled. According to Rosstat, the country’s rural population had fallen to roughly 36.6 million by 2024 and continues to shrink by several hundred thousand people a year when both migration to cities and natural population decline are taken into account.
Demographics offer no promise of reversal. In 2024, 1.222 million children were born in Russia, fewer than in any year since 1999. At the post-Soviet peak in 2014, there were 1.943 million births. In ten years, the decline exceeded one-third. Since the spring of 2025, Rosstat has stopped publishing detailed demographic statistics, and that decision is more revealing than any table. A state confident in its achievements does not hide birth data. According to estimates by independent demographers reconstructed from indirect sources, roughly 1.18 million children were born in 2025, while the first quarter of 2026 brought another 6 percent decline from the previous year’s level.
A word about sources is necessary. Census figures and Rosstat data through 2025 are official and, if they err, are more likely to do so in the direction of making the situation look better. Independent estimates for the past year and a half rely on incomplete data and may be off by several percentage points. But they accurately reflect the direction of the trend: as long as official releases were still being published, each new one confirmed the worse scenario rather than the better one.
Behind every territory stands infrastructure, without which a hectare becomes nothing more than a line in a cadastral register. Roads, schools, rural medical clinics, power grids, communications, jobs. Two decades of so-called optimization have closed thousands of rural schools and medical facilities in Russia’s hinterland, and every closure became a sentence for the village: families with children leave first, then the store disappears, then the bus service, and finally the light in the last occupied window goes out. The state failed to keep people on land that belongs to it without qualification or international dispute.
The Virgin Lands Instead of Kostroma: The Empire’s Chronic Disease
History rhymes with alarming precision. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev launched the Virgin Lands Campaign, and within several years, according to Soviet data, about 42 million hectares of new land were plowed in Kazakhstan, Siberia, the Altai region, and the Southern Urals. Hundreds of thousands of young people went east to develop the steppe. The Non-Black Earth region, from which much of this human flow originated, was left to decline.
A decade and a half later, Moscow declared tens of thousands of villages “unpromising.” Residents were relocated to larger central settlements, small schools and shops were closed, and people began leaving not for neighboring villages but for the cities. In March 1974, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Council of Ministers adopted a resolution on measures to develop agriculture in the Non-Black Earth zone of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, channeling enormous capital investment into the region. It did not save the countryside.
The next collapse came in the 1990s. In 1990, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic had nearly 118 million hectares under crops. Today, Russia plants about 80 million. The difference, almost 40 million hectares, is the same abandoned land viewed from another angle. The land reform of the early 1990s distributed collective-farm land to millions of rural residents in the form of shares, but most owners never had their shares physically demarcated. People aged, died, moved away, and their heirs forgot about the land. Unclaimed land shares became a legal swamp from which the state is still extracting hectares through the courts, one parcel at a time. Abandoned arable land often belongs neither to the state nor to a farmer, but to a deceased person whose heirs live in Moscow or abroad.
The pattern requires no manipulation to see. Again and again, the Russian state looks for answers to internal problems in external space: virgin lands instead of intensification, new frontiers instead of settled and developed territory. Space has always been a political resource here rather than an economic one, and expansion is measured in square kilometers on a map rather than in tons and rubles.
The Kremlin understands this better than many of its critics. On November 24, 2016, at an awards ceremony of the Russian Geographical Society, Vladimir Putin responded jokingly to a schoolboy’s remark by saying that Russia’s border “does not end anywhere.” The audience laughed. A little more than five years later, the joke assumed military form.
Thirteen Trillion for the Front and Scraps for the Farmland
Follow the money. In the last prewar year, 2021, spending under the “national defense” budget category was about 3.6 trillion rubles. By 2025, it had reached 13.49 trillion. The 2026 budget provides for 12.93 trillion rubles, with the overwhelming majority of defense line items classified. Add together spending on social policy, health care, education, and environmental protection, and the total comes to roughly 11.9 trillion rubles. Defense still costs more.
Now compare that with the main instrument for bringing abandoned land back into use. The state program for the effective utilization of agricultural land, launched in 2021, promises to return about 13.2 million hectares to agricultural use by 2030. It sounds impressive. According to calculations by academic geographers, land reclamation under the program is proceeding at a rate of about 200,000 hectares a year, while of the 1.98 million hectares that were supposed to be cleared of shrubs and woodland by 2030, only about 480,000 hectares had been cleared over three years as of April 2025. At that pace, restoring the 16 million hectares researchers consider the priority for recovery would take roughly 80 years.
Eighty years. Approximately the length of time separating us from 1945.
The Far Eastern Hectare program, launched in 2016, was conceived as a response to the depopulation of an enormous region. Ten years later, free land still has not reversed the population outflow from the Russian Far East. People are kept in place not by a plot of land, but by a salary, a road, a school, and a hospital, precisely the things for which an increasingly militarized budget leaves less and less money.
Vacuum attracts neighbors. In 2015, authorities in the Trans-Baikal Territory reached an agreement to lease up to 115,000 hectares to a Chinese company for 49 years, triggering a nationwide scandal. According to available information, Chinese tenants have worked for years on farmland in the Jewish Autonomous Region, the Amur Region, and Primorye, where local labor is in short supply. There is nothing criminal about this: unused land is cultivated by whoever has the people and capital. The fact itself is revealing. While Moscow fights for someone else’s hectares, it leases out its own, and over the post-Soviet decades the Far East, within the district’s former boundaries, has lost roughly a quarter of its population.
Money, however, has found another route into the hinterland. Regional governments pay one-time enlistment bonuses for signing military contracts, and together with federal payments, these sums have reportedly reached several million rubles in some regions. For a depressed district, these are amounts it has not seen in decades: a man from a dying village can receive more for a single signature than he would earn in years of local agricultural work. For the first time in a long while, the war has brought cash into the countryside while simultaneously taking away its last able-bodied men. Unemployment in Russia has fallen to historic lows, around 2 to 2.5 percent, and labor shortages are everywhere, including in the very agricultural conglomerates expected to restore abandoned farmland.
Who benefits? Defense plants, the security bureaucracy, contractors receiving reconstruction contracts in occupied cities, governors reporting on recruitment numbers. The Russian countryside loses. The taxpayer loses. But those losers have no voice in budget hearings.
Buying Ruins at the Price of an Empire
Even if one accepts the Kremlin’s logic and regards the new territories as a valuable acquisition, their cost must be calculated separately. On February 23, 2026, the Ukrainian government, the World Bank Group, the European Commission, and the United Nations published their fifth joint assessment of damage and reconstruction needs. Direct physical damage as of December 31, 2025 exceeded $195 billion, up from $176 billion a year earlier. Total reconstruction costs over the coming decade were estimated at nearly $588 billion, roughly three times Ukraine’s nominal gross domestic product for 2025.
The structure of these needs shows exactly what has been destroyed. Transportation accounts for more than $96 billion, energy for nearly $91 billion, housing for almost $90 billion, and agriculture for more than $55 billion. Another roughly $28 billion will be needed for demining and debris removal. Approximately 14 percent of Ukraine’s housing stock has been damaged or destroyed, affecting more than 3 million households. The authors of the assessment emphasize that damage is concentrated in frontline regions and major cities, precisely the areas into which the Russian army is advancing. These figures cover damage only through the end of 2025 and do not include destruction in 2026.
Moscow is not acquiring virgin land that can simply be plowed from scratch. It is acquiring ruins that require reconstruction. Before the war, Mariupol was a city of roughly 430,000 residents and a major metallurgical center. Today, it is above all a vast construction site financed by the Russian budget.
Water deserves a separate discussion. On June 6, 2023, the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed. Its reservoir supplied irrigation systems in southern Ukraine and the North Crimean Canal, and without that water, the famous southern black earth loses a significant share of its value in the arid steppe. The very argument about fertile land that might at least have been used to justify the war in economic terms has been devalued by the war itself. Fields crossed by the front are riddled with mines, and clearing them will take years. According to available information, crops from occupied fields in the southern regions are partly shipped through Crimean ports, and Kyiv calls this grain theft. The scale of these shipments is negligible compared with Russian exports and has no meaningful effect on the global market, but it gives the war the flavor of ordinary looting, which sits awkwardly alongside rhetoric about a historic mission.
Add the people to this equation, or rather their absence. Hundreds of thousands of residents have left the occupied territories over the course of the war. Russia distributes passports but cannot import a population that it lacks even for Kostroma. The result is the same problem of empty land, except now wrapped in ruins and international nonrecognition.
The Map Instead of the Field: What the Kremlin Is Really Fighting For
It would be naive to claim that the Kremlin does not know how to count hectares. It does. The war simply is not about them.
The objectives of the war lie elsewhere, and they should be named directly. The land corridor to Crimea, which since 2014 had depended on a bridge and ferries for supply. Water for the peninsula: Ukraine blocked the North Crimean Canal in 2014, and Russia reopened it only after capturing Nova Kakhovka in February 2022. The Sea of Azov, turned into an internal sea. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest in Europe, with six reactors and a total capacity of roughly six gigawatts. The industry and coal of the Donbas, however worn down they may be. Strategic depth and a buffer against the West, something Moscow has spoken about since 2007.
Above all of this stands an ideology formulated long before the invasion. On July 12, 2021, Putin published an article on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians in which he effectively denied Ukraine the right to separate statehood. On June 9, 2022, while visiting an exhibition in Moscow marking the 350th anniversary of Peter the Great’s birth, he compared the current war with the Great Northern War and said that Russia, too, had been given the task of “returning and strengthening.” The word “returning” is crucial. This is about restoring a symbolic map, not economic development.
On September 30, 2022, Russia announced the incorporation of four Ukrainian regions into its territory, including parts it had never controlled, among them the regional capitals of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The territory was written into the Constitution before a Russian soldier had set foot on it. An owner concerned with farmland does not act this way. A government for which the border on a map matters more than what grows beyond it does.
To be fair, Moscow also has an argument it considers rational: NATO expansion, promises that it says were made in the early 1990s, and fear of Western military infrastructure near its borders. I will not debate that argument here, although Finland and Sweden joining the alliance in 2023 and 2024 demonstrates that the war produced precisely the opposite result. It is enough to note one other thing. The security for which the country has been burning resources for five years does not include protecting its own countryside from extinction.
The political function of such expansion is transparent. A regime unable to offer its citizens rising incomes, lower mortality, and modern infrastructure in the hinterland sells them greatness measured in square kilometers. Territorial expansion is presented as proof of strength, while its cost disappears into classified budget lines. Kostroma’s abandoned farmland does not appear in this accounting because its loss has no television image.
The Japanese Lesson and the Azerbaijani Contrast
The decline of the rural population is not unique to Russia. Japan encountered it earlier and in an even more severe form. According to the 2023 housing survey, the country had about 9 million vacant homes, approximately 13.8 percent of its total housing stock, an all-time record. Tokyo has responded with registries of abandoned homes, subsidies for relocation from the capital, and programs for young farmers. The results are modest, but the direction is clear: the state fights for every one of its own villages rather than looking for a solution across the sea. The Japanese Empire sought such a solution in Manchuria in the 1930s, and how that ended in 1945 is well known.
An example closer to me is Azerbaijan. For thirty years, about 20 percent of its internationally recognized territory was under Armenian occupation, in defiance of four United Nations Security Council resolutions adopted in 1993, Resolutions 822, 853, 874, and 884, which demanded the withdrawal of occupying forces. In the fall of 2020, Azerbaijan restored sovereignty over its lands and immediately faced the challenge Russia now confronts in the territories it occupies: cities and villages had been destroyed to their foundations, fields were mined, and the population was gone.
Baku’s response was fundamentally different. Fuzuli International Airport opened in October 2021, and Zangilan International Airport followed in October 2022. The first residents returned to the rebuilt village of Aghali in the Zangilan District in the summer of 2022. The first State Program on the Great Return, approved by President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, covers the period from 2022 through 2026. Azerbaijan is rebuilding its own land for its own internally displaced people, who waited three decades to return. The land was returned to the people who were born there.
The difference between the two stories is fundamental, and it must be stated clearly. Azerbaijan regained what belongs to it under international law and is investing resources in repopulation. Russia seizes someone else’s territory, destroys it in the process of taking it, and then discovers that there is no one to settle there because its own countryside died out first.
Two Scenarios, and Neither Saves the Countryside
The first scenario is a frozen conflict along the current line of contact. Moscow retains an acquisition recognized de facto but not de jure and spends years pouring resources into rebuilding occupied cities. The money for Mariupol and Sievierodonetsk comes from the same budget that is supposed to finance the return of abandoned arable land to production, and under the political logic of the system, the new regions will always take priority: they must serve as a showcase proving that the war was justified. In such a hierarchy, the Kostroma Region will remain at the very end of the line.
The second scenario is a prolonged war of attrition. Here the countryside loses twice. Men are taken by the front, while defense spending and servicing the growing national debt consume the budget. About 3.9 trillion rubles has been allocated for debt servicing in 2026, nearly 9 percent of all expenditures. Land will continue to fall out of agricultural use faster than it is restored, while government agencies compensate with upbeat reports about cadastral registration.
The difference between the scenarios is one of speed. Their direction is the same.
What Comes Next: A Forecast with Dates
Predictions without dates are worthless, so I will put four testable propositions on the record.
First. By December 31, 2030, Russia will not have returned even half of the 13.2 million hectares promised under the state program to agricultural use, while official reports will measure success by the area entered into the cadastral register rather than by the area actually planted.
Second. The next nationwide census, which by law must take place no later than 2031, will show more than 30,000 rural settlements without a single permanent resident.
Third. Rosstat will not resume full publication of monthly demographic statistics before the end of 2027, while the number of births in 2026, according to estimates by independent demographers, will fall below 1.15 million.
Fourth. Any ceasefire concluded before the end of 2027 will be presented by the Kremlin as a territorial gain, and not a single official document describing it will contain the words “Non-Black Earth region.”
One question remains, and I do not have an answer to it. How many more villages must empty out before Russian society begins measuring the strength of the state by the number of living villages rather than by the location of the front line?
As long as no one in Moscow asks that question aloud, nature answers it in its own way. On a Kostroma field abandoned in the early 1990s, a birch forest more than thirty years old now stands. No one stormed it. It came on its own, without casualties, and occupied territory the state failed to notice because all these years it was staring at the map of Zaporizhzhia.