Russian regions in wartime: fiscal and economic effects of the Russo-Ukrainian war

This article addresses the economic and fiscal consequences of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine for subnational governments in Russia. Using annual fiscal and economic data, we study how different groups of regions have been affected by the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. Despite the Russian economy being more resilient to a sanctions shock than initially predicted, we document several important negative tendencies at the regional level, sometimes overlooked in policy discussions and the literature on economic sanctions. In this article, we present new regional data and focus on the effects of the war on overall regional tax collections in 2022–2023, as well as the dynamics of different types of regional and federal taxes. We identify several groups of “winners” (oil- and gas-extracting regions, weapons-producing regions, and the largest city-regions) and “losers” (regions that share a border with Ukraine and regions with sanctions-prone industrial specializations) and discuss the prospects of their resilience.