Kremlin Power Struggle? Moscow Mayor Warns Total Economic Mobilization Will Kill the Country

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin warns that total economic mobilization for the war against Ukraine could destroy Russia’s normal economy and kill the country itself.

Kremlin Opposition or Rare Pushback?

The Kyiv Post emphasizes in its article that Sergei Sobyanin is not an opponent of the Kremlin, and his words should not be interpreted as opposition to the war itself. What matters is something else—this is a rare, clear rejection of the hardline demand for Russia to mobilize virtually all available economic resources for the war effort.

In an interview with the TASS agency broadcast on August 5, Sobyanin said he constantly hears demands for the total mobilization of the economy and its redirection toward the war, but as he noted, the modern economy works differently: without a peacetime economy, there will be no taxes or population incomes. To kill the normal economy is to kill the country itself, he stated.

Dueling Visions in Russian Leadership

In other words, the mayor of Moscow warns that Russia cannot endlessly increase arms production, defense spending, and war mobilization without the risk of undermining the tax base, consumer economy, and living standards upon which the functioning of the state itself relies.

Sobyanin’s statement came at a time when influential Russian deputies are demanding the exact opposite direction. State Duma defense committee member Andrei Kolesnik called for a transition to wartime tracks after Ukrainian drone attacks on the Moscow region, and the first deputy chairman of the Duma economic policy committee, Nikolai Arefyev, has long argued that Russia should have introduced a mobilization economy earlier.

The Flaw in Wartime Economic Logic

This is a typical pattern for Russian wartime thinking: if Moscow fails to achieve its intended goals, the response is supposed to be even more mobilization, more arms production, and deeper subordination of civilian life to the war effort. However, Sobyanin points out the flaw in this logic—a modern wartime economy does not exist in isolation from the civilian economy. At a certain point, the latter stops merely funding the war and begins to be eaten away from within by it.

For most of the period since the full-scale invasion in 2022, massive state spending allowed Moscow to effectively deny forecasts of rapid economic collapse. Arms factories were expanded, government orders drove industrial regions, and soldiers’ salaries and compensation boosted household incomes. Western sanctions cost a lot, but the Kremlin coped with redirecting trade and raw material exports.

Slowing Growth and Soaring Military Spending

However, this model assumed that the Kremlin still had enough money, labor force, and industrial capacity to continue developing—and this is now clearly shrinking. The Russian central bank lowered its GDP growth forecast for 2026 to 0-1 percent, and official economic data show a slowdown close to stagnation. At the same time, military spending reached a record level. As German economist Janis Kluge calculated based on data from the Russian Ministry of Finance, in the first quarter of 2026 alone it amounted to 5.9 trillion rubles, which is nearly 30 percent more than the previous year.

Kyiv is increasingly successfully striking infrastructure that allows Russia to finance and sustain the invasion—refineries, fuel bases, logistics centers, and other facilities deep inside Russian territory. Such attacks generate costs that go beyond physical destruction alone: Russia must repair infrastructure, protect facilities using scarce air defense systems, redirect logistics, and deal with production disruptions. The Kremlin is therefore forced to spend more and more not only on attacking Ukraine, but also on defending its own economic infrastructure that makes these attacks possible in the first place.