On 24 October the federal legal register published two Pskov region acts signed a day apart. Decree No. 412 of the regional government, signed 21 October, adds one line to the list of things a budget subsidy may be spent on. Decree No. 187 of the governor, signed 22 October, widens the list of people the region pays for signing a military contract. Read together they describe both ends of one transaction: the region now pays the person who signs, and the business that found them. All the documents below are official scans without a text layer; we read them page by page, along with the 2023 decree they amend and the governor’s September amendment, and every figure and quotation here comes from those texts.
The nineteenth line
Decree No. 412 amends the rules, set by decree No. 300 of 20 July 2023, for a subsidy from the regional budget to a regional autonomous non-commercial organisation — the Defence and Security Assistance Squad, “Druzhina”. Point 3 of those rules lists the spending directions the money may cover. The decree adds one:
“19) payment of costs connected with paying for the services of legal persons and individual entrepreneurs for the search for citizens of the Russian Federation, foreign citizens, stateless persons in order to attract them to conclude, on the territory of Pskov region, a contract for military service in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation.”
What makes that line visible is the eighteen it was added to. We read them in the 2023 original. Directions 1 to 11 are the cost of keeping an organisation alive: wages, social contributions, transport and business trips, communications, software, fixed assets “including office furniture and office equipment”, consumables “including household appliances, stationery”, utilities, repairs to office equipment, bank charges, rent of premises and equipment. Directions 12 to 14 cover services rendered to state bodies in the fields of defence, state and public security, crime prevention, civil and territorial defence, fire safety and emergencies. The last four are softer still: help to people hurt by natural disasters and to refugees, methodological and legal help in defending human rights, informing the public about healthy living and sport, and — direction 18 — “services in the sphere of the development of patriotic, including military-patriotic, upbringing of citizens of the Russian Federation”.
So the list ran from bank charges to patriotic education. Direction 19 is a different kind of thing: not the organisation’s own upkeep, and not a service it renders, but the purchase of recruitment brokerage on the open market. The buyer is the regional budget; the sellers are companies and sole traders; the product is a person who signs.
The decree nowhere calls this procurement. What it does instead is give direction 19 a cash procedure of its own. Point 22, which governs transfers, is amended to apply “to the spending directions specified in sub-points 1 to 18 of point 3” — the old route, for the old list. A new point 22.1 handles direction 19: as the need arises, the organisation submits an application for transfer stating its planned costs, and “an act on the rendering of services with an attached reporting form established by the Agreement”. A new point 23.1 gives the regional Directorate three working days to check those documents and the Administrative Directorate two more to send a financing request to the Pskov region Ministry of Finance. Point 27 adds that reports on direction 19 money carry extra information in a form the Agreement sets. An act of services rendered is the document a contractor signs when a job is done. Here the job is finding a person.
Three details sit alongside. The decree replaces “Finance Committee” with “Ministry of Finance of Pskov region” in point 23 — the region renamed the body that pays. It takes effect the day after publication but “extends to legal relations that arose from 21 October 2026”, so the authority is backdated to the day of signature. And the subsidy as a whole sits inside the state programme named in the decree’s preamble, “Ensuring public order and countering crime in Pskov region” — not the defence section of anyone’s budget.
The other end: 1.2 million roubles a signature
Decree No. 187 amends a 2024 governor’s decree on cash payments to contract servicemen. Its changes are repetitive and small, and all of one kind: in five places, the categories entitled to a payment are extended. After the words “unmanned systems troops”, the text now also names “servicemen who have concluded a contract for military service in the military posts of mid-level medical personnel”; after “airborne troops”, it adds those who signed “in the military posts of doctors”. A fifth amendment adds “in the military posts of doctors and mid-level medical personnel” to a reporting sub-point.
The decree also rewrites where the money comes from. The authorised body is to organise the release of regional budget funds for these payments in the manner set by regional decree No. 299 of 10 September 2024, “On the procedure for using budget appropriations of the reserve fund of the Government of Pskov region”. And it sets a deadline: the one-off payment goes to the serviceman’s bank account within 15 working days of the authorities receiving his details.
Neither of October’s decrees states a sum. The governor’s amendment of a month earlier does. On 21 September the same 2024 decree was amended by decree No. 160, which inserted a new paragraph into point 1:
“for servicemen not specified in the third and fourth paragraphs of the present point, who have concluded, by 31 December 2026, a contract for military service in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation — 1200 thousand roubles.”
That is 1.2 million roubles from the regional budget for a signature, for contracts signed before the end of this year, and it too was backdated — to 21 September 2026. It is the regional payment alone, stacked on the federal one-off that decree No. 160’s own preamble cites — presidential decree No. 644 of 31 July 2024, whose amount these texts do not state.
The arithmetic of who gets what needs care, and the documents only take it so far. The 1.2 million is defined by exclusion: it is for servicemen not named in the third and fourth paragraphs. Those two paragraphs are precisely the ones October’s decree extended to mid-level medical staff and doctors. So medical staff are not joining the 1.2 million rate — they are joining the two special categories that sit outside it, alongside drone and airborne troops, whose amounts are written in the base 2024 decree. We did not obtain that decree’s text. The federal register does not support searching by document name, and its date filters returned the same recent set of regional acts whatever range we asked for.
Why this is about the ability to pay for the war
Recruitment has a price, and these two decrees show a region paying it in both directions at once. One pays the recruit 1.2 million roubles. The other opens a budget line to pay whoever produces the recruit, on an act of services rendered, with no ceiling on the number of acts.
The second is the structurally new thing. A one-off payment to a person who signs is a known instrument; every region has one. A standing authority to buy search services from companies and sole traders turns recruitment into a procurement relationship with a private supply chain, and makes its cost a recurring regional expense that scales with the number of people found. The text names the targets as citizens of Russia, foreign citizens and stateless persons — the region is paying to have all three looked for.
Where it is parked matters as much. This is not the National Defence section of the federal budget. It is a subsidy to a non-commercial organisation under a regional public-order programme, next to office furniture and patriotic education, drawn on the regional budget. And the 2023 rules cap it: point 5 provides the subsidy “within the limits of budget appropriations provided by the law of Pskov region on the regional budget” and the budget obligation limits conveyed to the chief administrator. No act in the 24 October package amends the region’s budget law. Unless one follows, direction 19 is funded from the envelope that already had to cover the other eighteen.
The payments side draws on something thinner still. Decree No. 187 routes the money through the regional government’s reserve fund — the discretionary pot a region keeps for emergencies and cash gaps. Each category added to the entitlement list reserves more of it in advance. We have watched funds of this kind do similar work elsewhere this month: a defence reserve settling interior-ministry debts, and Crimea’s reserve-fund day for airports. Four days ago we reported that Arkhangelsk moved 6,835,000.00 roubles onto its one-off payment for residents who go to the war and noted that the decree never said what one payment was worth, so the number of contracts it covered could not be derived. Pskov’s September amendment supplies a regional figure of that kind: 1.2 million roubles each. On Arkhangelsk’s own rate the documents are still silent, and the two regions’ rates need not match.
The extension to doctors and mid-level medical staff is its own small signal. Military medical posts are now bought on the same financial terms as airborne and drone-operator posts — the categories a region reaches for when it is competing hardest for people.
What this changes in our model
Nothing today, by construction. The consolidated regional budget balance scores 33 out of 100, with a rolling twelve-month reading of −1.466 trillion roubles against a pre-war anchor of the 2021 surplus of +0.661 trillion and a registered trouble line at −2.5 trillion. The strength index stands at 46 out of 100, in the stress zone. No reading moved in today’s data update; all eight are on the monitor, and how the consolidated regional balance is measured is set out in the guide.
These are authorisations, not payments. A spending direction added in October reaches our series only when it has been spent and the Treasury reports it, and a single region’s subsidy is small against a 1.466 trillion rouble deficit. What the legal record adds is the shape of the commitment: an open-ended line, backdated to the day it was signed, inside a capped envelope, in a region that has to find the money before the execution data ever shows it.
What we do not know
Any sum attached to direction 19. The decree sets no limit on the new line, no tariff per person found, and does not state the subsidy’s total for 2026. The price appears to be left to the Agreement between the Directorate and the organisation, which is not published.
Whether new money follows. The 24 October package contains no amendment to the regional budget law. Whether direction 19 gets its own appropriation, or comes out of what the subsidy already had, is not answerable from these texts.
What doctors and mid-level medical staff will actually receive. They were added to the two categories excluded from the 1.2 million rate, and those categories’ amounts are in the 2024 base decree we could not retrieve.
Who the suppliers are. The decree names a market — legal persons and individual entrepreneurs offering search services — without saying how many operate in the region, how one is chosen, or whether any selection procedure applies. The procurement portal did not respond from our environment.
What the reserve fund holds. Decree No. 187 points at the government’s reserve fund as the source for the payments. Neither decree states the fund’s balance, what has been paid out of it this year, or how many contracts have been signed in the region.