This was Russia today Monday, October 20, 2025

Howdy, folks. Don’t miss today’s news digest. In the missive below, you’ll get a summary of Andrey Pertsev’s new Sergey Sobyanin profile. Let us know if you’re enjoying the newsletter’s new format, why don’t you.

Fifteen years of Sergey Sobyanin

In a profile of Sergey Sobyanin’s tenure as Moscow’s long-serving mayor, Meduza journalist Andrey Pertsev describes the interplay of personnel changes and electoral shifts over the past 15 years. The key takeaway from the report is that Sobyanin has served the Kremlin as a competent administrator whose allies are now as entrenched in the city’s government as Yuri Luzhkov’s clan once was. While Sobyanin’s reputation is generally that of a loyal bureaucrat, Pertsev notes instances where Moscow’s mayor has demonstrated his own goals and ambitions, albeit reservedly.

According to Pertsev, Sobyanin’s team was quick to claim publicity niches that led to several successful transformations of the city’s image. While the new mayor failed his first major electoral test, when fraud in Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections triggered mass protests, the Kremlin didn’t blame Sobyanin for the unrest. Just a few months later, when Putin contentiously returned to the presidency, Moscow’s election results did not exacerbate the winter’s tensions, and the protest movement was soon crushed.

Sobyanin himself made his most noteworthy foray into electoral politics with his 2014 reelection campaign, when he sought to use Russia’s reinstated gubernatorial elections (Moscow’s mayor is technically a governor-level position) to boost his political legitimacy while extending his term in office. The 2014 mayoral race was memorable for Alexey Navalny’s participation — a candidacy made possible by Sobyanin’s unorthodox decision to share crucial municipal endorsements with the opposition politician. 

According to Pertsev’s sources, allowing Navalny to compete in 2014 was meant to expose his low popularity. A showing of less than 10–15 percent of the vote would supposedly have “meant Navalny’s political death.” On the other hand, two strategists told Pertsev that the Kremlin’s domestic policy czar at the time, Vladislav Volodin, was also ready to welcome better results for Navalny, believing it would curb Sobyanin’s ambitions and “self-confidence.” In the end, Sobyanin narrowly recorded a first-round election win, apparently satisfying the Putin administration.

Following his victory, Sobyanin’s office gradually exerted greater control over elections, taking fewer risks. Officials changed the rules for the Moscow City Duma, replacing party lists with single-mandate districts, in order to concentrate the resources they poured into favored candidates. The mayor’s office also organized primaries to circumvent various campaigning laws. 

Beginning in 2016, mass renovation projects designed for urban beautification caused widespread displacement and anger. The following year, public discontent started to show itself in election outcomes for municipal councils, thanks also to grassroots mobilization efforts by figures like Dmitry Gudkov and Maxim Katz. Paradoxically, the anti-Kremlin opposition now benefited from the authorities’ efforts to suppress voter turnout, as activists succeeded in activating protest voters. Pertsev’s sources argue that Sergey Kiriyenko, who by then oversaw the Kremlin’s domestic policy team, planned to use the mismanagement of Moscow’s 2016 municipal elections against Anastasia Rakova, Sobyanin’s long-time trusted lieutenant. 

After the election, responsibility for city politics shifted to two other figures on Sobyanin’s team: Deputy Mayor Natalia Sergunina and the head of the city’s trade department, Alexey Nemeryuk. As a result, some unpredictability returned to Moscow’s elections, as Sergunina and Nemeryuk struggled to adapt to their new duties. Despite the confusion, the city government continued to restrict the opposition’s access to candidacy, implementing a policy of rejecting nomination signatures en masse. In the summer of 2019, a violent police crackdown on demonstrators led to another sprawling criminal investigation that dragged more than 30 people into court. Led by Alexey Navalny’s team, the anti-Kremlin opposition fought back with a strategic voting initiative called “Smart Vote,” but the authorities would ultimately defuse this scheme with the introduction of “remote electronic voting” (DEG), making it virtually impossible to monitor the process of casting and counting ballots.

In early 2020, Sobyanin reportedly made Rakova’s appointment as Moscow’s next mayor his condition for becoming Russia’s next prime minister — terms that Putin rejected, sources told Pertsev. Sobyanin is still reportedly ready to accept a higher appointment, if called upon, “but that goal grows more elusive with time,” a source told Pertsev. At the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sobyanin needed prodding from Putin to embrace the country’s new militarized spirit. The city’s huge signing bonuses to contract soldiers are now imitated around the country, but the mayor’s prominence and influence may have peaked years earlier, when Moscow’s strict pandemic lockdown launched Sobyanin to such visibility that Putin’s spokesman once had to clarify that Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, not the capital’s mayor, was leading Russia’s COVID response. These days, Sobyanin has faded from the nation’s spotlight.

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Fighting the free press, from Moscow to Mar-a-Lago: Can you tell Russian media crackdowns from Trump’s America?

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Today’s reporting from Meduza

• 🗞️ Trump cusses out Zelensky, ‘your mom’ chose Budapest, and Moscow’s subway raids: Meduza breaks down today’s biggest Russia-related news stories, October 20, 2025 (9 minutes)
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