A vague trigger, a familiar tool
On August 24, 2026, President Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 604, "On Measures to Ensure the Security of Critical Infrastructure Facilities of the Russian Federation." It authorizes the government to impose temporary state management over fuel and energy, industrial, communications, utility, transport, logistics, and nuclear-energy facilities whenever private owners fail to protect them from drone strikes, violate unspecified "security requirements," or are "slow" to repair damage. Rosimushchestvo, the federal property agency, becomes the default administrator, gaining full owner-equivalent authority over an entity's physical, financial, and legal assets — short of the power to sell them — for as long as the government decides, with no fixed end date. Termination requires another government decision on a presidential directive. There is no judicial review built into the text and no compensation mechanism specified.
First Deputy PM Denis Manturov moved quickly to reframe the decree, telling reporters it is "not about nationalization or a change in the form of ownership" but rather the state "stepping into management... to address specific security tasks," applied only in "targeted and carefully calibrated" cases, not en masse.
The steelman: an industrial base under real attack
The case for some emergency mechanism is not manufactured. Since early summer 2026, Ukraine has run a sustained campaign against the commercial backbone of the Russian war economy — not just refineries, but e-commerce logistics. On August 22 and 24, Ukrainian drones hit multiple Ozon warehouses across the Krasnodar region, Dagestan, Adygeya, and Stavropol — killing three teenagers in Krasnodar, hospitalizing six more children, and knocking Ozon shares down as much as 28% on the Moscow Exchange in a single session, with major shareholder AFK Sistema falling over 13%. That attack followed more than a month of strikes on Wildberries facilities, Ozon's larger rival, which Ukraine accuses of supplying military logistics. A government genuinely worried that private operators are under-investing in air defense, or delaying repairs that leave supply chains disrupted for weeks, has a legitimate coordination problem: individual firms internalize their own security costs but not the systemic cost of a prolonged outage at a fuel depot or a national retailer's warehouse network. A narrowly drawn, judicially reviewable emergency-management statute, triggered by objective criteria and sunsetted automatically, would be a defensible response to that externality.
Why the decree fails that test anyway
Decree No. 604 is not that instrument. Every trigger — "failed to take adequate measures," "violated security requirements," "created a threat to normal operation," "delayed" repairs — is a discretionary judgment call made by the government itself, with no independent adjudicator and no published standard for how much protection is "adequate." Combined with the absence of a time limit, that discretion is the whole story: any firm the state wants to control, in any of six-plus sectors covering most of the productive economy, can be brought under Rosimushchestvo's management on a finding the government alone makes and the government alone unwinds.
Manturov's "not nationalization" line is technically accurate and substantively beside the point. Retaining nominal ownership while stripping an owner of every operating decision except the right to eventually sell — a right the temporary manager can render worthless in the meantime — is a distinction without much practical difference for the firm on the receiving end. Russia has run this playbook before: Decree No. 302 of April 2023 put Danone's and Carlsberg's Russian subsidiaries under Rosimushchestvo "temporary management" — again without a fixed term, again framed as administrative rather than expropriatory — and both firms spent over a year unable to exercise ownership before eventually offloading their stakes at a loss. Decree 604 generalizes that same mechanism from foreign-owned assets under sanctions retaliation to any critical-sector firm, foreign or domestic, judged insufficiently drone-hardened.
The chilling effect is the actual policy
The practical function of an open-ended, discretion-triggered seizure power is not primarily to run warehouses better than Ozon or Wildberries can — Rosimushchestvo has no particular expertise in e-commerce logistics or refinery hardening. It is to make every large infrastructure operator in Russia treat continued private control as conditional on staying in the government's good graces, since the metric for compliance is undefined and the reviewer is the same body that benefits from finding non-compliance. That incentive does not obviously produce more air-defense investment; it produces firms that spend on visible compliance theater and political relationships rather than on the repairs and hardening the decree ostensibly demands. For a system already contending with capital flight and a shrinking pool of firms willing to operate exposed infrastructure, a rule that can nationalize-in-substance any company the state dislikes, with no court to appeal to, is more likely to accelerate disinvestment than to fix the underlying vulnerability to Ukrainian strikes.