On 26 October the federal legal register published decree No. 184 of the governor of Kostroma region, signed on 23 October by Sergey Sitnikov. It adds one point to the rules the region has used since 2022 to pay people who sign a military contract, and that point creates a second price. The people the region counts as its own — those registered there, and those its own recruiters bring in — get 1.6 million roubles. Anyone else the decree does not exclude gets 1 million. All the documents below are official scans without a text layer; we read them page by page: decree No. 184 itself, the 2022 decree it amends, the April decree that set the 1.6 million, the July decree that extended it, and two earlier amendments to the same categories, of March 2026 and of February 2025. Every figure and quotation here comes from those texts.
The second price
Decree No. 184 amends governor’s decree No. 251 of 12 November 2022. Its preamble lists the sixteen amendments made before this one — one in 2023, four in 2024, seven in 2025 and four already this year — so what was published on Monday is the seventeenth rewrite of the same payment. The new material is a point that did not exist before:
“2.2. To establish that other citizens (with the exception of the citizens specified in points 1.1, 2.1 of the present decree), not registered on the day of conclusion of the contract by place of residence or place of stay on the territory of Kostroma region and having concluded the contracts specified in sub-point 1 of point 1 of the present decree, the one-off payment in the amount of 1,000,000 roubles is made from 20 October 2026 to 31 December 2026 inclusive.”
Two things in that sentence do the work. The first is “other citizens”: a category defined by what it is not — not registered in the region, and not already covered by points 1.1 or 2.1. The second is the date range. The decree takes effect on the day of publication, 26 October, but the payment runs from 20 October, so the authority is backdated by six days and expires after seventy-three.
The contracts it covers are not just any contract. Sub-point 1 of point 1, as decree No. 184 restates it, is a contract “on the territory of Kostroma region on the passage of military service in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation for a term of one year and more” for the tasks of the special military operation “on the territories of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the Lugansk People’s Republic, Zaporizhzhia region, Kherson region and Ukraine”. The signature still has to happen in Kostroma region. What has been removed is the requirement that the person belong there.
Decree No. 184 also says how the money reaches them. A new sub-point 6 of point 5 provides that citizens under point 2.2 are paid “on the basis of a register of citizens provided by the selection point for military service under contract (2nd category) of the city of Kostroma, agreed with the department of regional security of Kostroma region”. The neighbouring sub-point 3, restated by the same decree, pays a different category “without application” on the basis of a register from the regional military commissariat. Those words do not appear in sub-point 6, and whether a person in the new category has to apply does not follow from this text.
What the region pays the people it finds itself
The sum for everybody else is not in decree No. 184. It is in point 1.1, which No. 184 rewrites only in its first paragraph, and which now reads that the payment goes to citizens “registered on the day of conclusion of the contract by place of residence or place of stay on the territory of Kostroma region, and also not registered … attracted by the instructors of the selection point for military service under contract (2nd category) of the city of Kostroma”.
So point 1.1 is not simply the locals. It is the locals plus the outsiders the region’s own recruiting office brought in. The amount attached to it was set six months ago by decree No. 70 of 23 April 2026, titled “On increasing the amount and extending the period of provision”, which added a paragraph to point 1.1:
“from 1 May 2026 to 31 July 2026 inclusive — the one-off payment is made in the amount of 1,600,000 roubles.”
That window would have closed in the summer. Decree No. 139 of 30 July 2026, signed by the acting governor A. Svistunov, replaced the words “to 31 July” in that paragraph with “to 31 December”. The 1.6 million therefore runs to the end of this year — the same day the new 1 million expires.
The two rates are directly comparable, because point 2.2 covers contracts under sub-point 1 of point 1, which point 1.1 covers too. For the same contract, in the same region, in the same weeks, the region pays 1,600,000 roubles for a recruit who is registered there or came through its selection point, and 1,000,000 for one who arrived by any other route. The difference is 600,000 roubles; the second rate is 62.5 per cent of the first. The line the price turns on is not where the person lives but which channel delivered them.
A gate that has been opened and closed before
Against the decree it amends, the direction of travel is easier to see. The original text of decree No. 251 of 12 November 2022 established the payment at 50,000 roubles, and it went to “citizens of the Russian Federation residing on the territory of Kostroma region”. Residence was in the first sentence of the measure. Point 3 of that decree added that the payment “is provided once at the expense of the funds of the regional budget”.
Almost four years and sixteen amendments later, the sum is thirty-two times as large for the region’s own recruits and twenty times as large for everyone else, and that second group now has a cheaper tier of its own.
The eligibility gate has not moved in one direction only. Decree No. 15 of 13 February 2025 narrowed it twice over: it struck from point 1 the carve-out “(with the exception of separate categories of citizens determined by the Government of the Russian Federation)”, and it added point 2.1, under which the payment is not made to people who, on the day they signed, “were serving a punishment in the form of deprivation of liberty”, counting from 1 April 2025. That exclusion is still standing — it is one of the two points the new “other citizens” are defined against.
Then it narrowed again, and this month it reversed. Decree No. 53 of 27 March 2026 ordered that in the first paragraph of point 1 “the words ‘(including repeatedly)’ shall be excluded”, and struck from sub-point 1 the words extending it to citizens called up by mobilisation into the Armed Forces. Decree No. 184 now restates point 1 in full, and the restored text reads: the payment goes to “citizens (foreign citizens), servicemen in the reserve, who have concluded (including repeatedly)”. The words removed in March are back in October. The mobilisation clause was not restored to sub-point 1.
Why this is about the ability to pay for the war
A region that was paying 50,000 roubles to its own residents in 2022 is now paying 1.6 million to the people it recruits and 1 million to anyone else who turns up to sign, and it is doing both out of the same regional budget. The first number is the price of the war to one Russian region. The second is new, and it is the more revealing one.
Opening the payment to people with no registration in the region is a competitive act: it is an offer aimed at residents of other regions, made in the same weeks that Pskov opened a budget line to pay companies for finding recruits, on top of the 1.2 million roubles a signature it already pays. Two regions are now bidding for the same people with their own money. But Kostroma is not bidding up — it is bidding at a discount. It will take an outsider, and it will pay 600,000 roubles less for one.
The discount is the part worth holding on to. A region that simply wanted more recruits would raise its rate. A region that has set a lower rate for people arriving outside its own recruiting channel is doing something narrower: extending the offer to a group it was not reaching, at a price it can bear, in the quarter when regional budgets close the year. Neither decree sets a ceiling on how many payments may be made. The cost is therefore not fixed by an appropriation but by how many people sign in seventy-three days.
Where it sits matters too. This is a governor’s decree, not a budget law, and nothing in it names an appropriation. It is the regional budget that pays, which is why an expense of this kind lands in the consolidated regional budget balance and not in the defence section of anyone’s federal budget. We have watched the same money move in other regions this month: a defence reserve settling interior-ministry debts, and Arkhangelsk moving 6,835,000.00 roubles onto its payment for residents who go to the war. Kostroma’s contribution to that picture is a published price list with two lines on it.
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 rates, not payments. A sum promised in October reaches our series only when it has been paid and the Treasury reports it. What the legal record adds is the shape of the commitment: an open-ended obligation, backdated to before its own publication, expiring on the last day of the budget year, in a region that has to find the money before the execution data ever shows it.
What we do not know
How many people either rate will be paid for. Neither decree caps the number of payments, states a total for 2026, or names a budget line. The cost is whatever the seventy-three days produce.
Why the outside rate is lower. The documents give no reasoning. A rate 600,000 roubles below the region’s own is stated, not explained.
The current wording of point 3. The 2022 original says the payment is provided once and comes from the regional budget. We read six of the seventeen acts in this chain; the eleven we did not read could have amended that point, and the register publishes amendments rather than a consolidated text. The funding source is quoted here as the original rule, not as a verified current one — which also leaves the relation between “provided once” and the restored “(including repeatedly)” unresolved on the texts we have.
Whether a person in the new category must apply. The register procedure is set out for them; the words “without application” are in the neighbouring sub-point and not in theirs.
How this compares with other regions. The register’s search matches document titles, and these acts are titled differently in every subject, so no one phrase catches them all. We make no claim that Kostroma is the first to do this.
What the region has already spent. Nothing in these texts says how many payments have been made under any of the sixteen earlier versions, or whether the regional payment stacks on the federal one-off.