What is still taking shape in the Kremlin's thinking is already being voiced by its chief television propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov. Recently, he proposed relocating residents of Russia's frontline regions to other parts of the country that remain relatively safe. His argument followed the standard Kremlin propaganda script: winter is approaching, Ukraine may target Russia's energy infrastructure, the so-called "kill zone" has expanded, and other familiar warnings.

This is where the proposal becomes particularly revealing. Unsurprisingly, Solovyov does not suggest protecting people by ending the war or withdrawing Russian troops. His solution is far simpler: remove residents from the areas where the Kremlin itself created the disaster and resettle them in Siberia, the Urals, the Volga region, or the Russian Far East.

"Once the front line moves back, we will rebuild everything, and people will return to their homes," Solovyov promises. At the same time, he argues that "we are wasting our workforce while watching people live under extremely difficult conditions. There should be a state resettlement program—not temporary accommodation, but proper housing. Especially since we have so many newly built apartments that, for various reasons, cannot be sold."

Solovyov Has Sold Out to Property Developers

"We never abandon our own"—this is the moral packaging of Solovyov's proposal. Translated into plain language, it means that if the state can no longer provide decent living conditions in the areas where it has brought war, it will simply redefine "normal" as somewhere else. Under this logic, people are reduced to little more than units to be relocated—a workforce to be redistributed and a bed to be assigned.

Behind this moral veneer, however, lies a very tangible economic calculation. Solovyov laments the growing inventory of unsold newly built apartments across Russia and suggests that the state should simply purchase them and move displaced people in. At first glance, it sounds like an act of social responsibility. In reality, it is an almost ready-made mechanism in which humanitarian rhetoric conveniently aligns with the mounting crisis facing Russia's property developers.

Russia's new housing market is entering increasingly difficult territory. Nearly 27% of residential projects currently under construction are selling below sustainable levels. The average escrow account coverage of project debt has fallen to just 66%, while developers now carry approximately 89,000 rubles in loan debt for every square meter under construction.

This is not yet a wave of mass bankruptcies, but it is already a serious structural fault line—particularly for regional and smaller developers with limited financial reserves. The high key interest rate has made borrowing prohibitively expensive, the pool of buyers continues to shrink, and launching new projects has become increasingly difficult. If these pressures intensify, banks—or ultimately the state—may be forced to complete unfinished developments. In other words, the crisis could spread far beyond the construction industry itself.

The picture is no better on the secondary housing market or in the rental sector. During the first quarter of this year, rental rates declined sharply in several major Russian cities: by 20% in Volgograd, 16.7% in Nizhny Novgorod, 16% in Chelyabinsk, and even by nearly 6% in Moscow, where housing has traditionally been in short supply. Meanwhile, the supply of rental properties increased by an average of 28.1%.

The reasons are straightforward. Homeowners who can no longer sell their apartments because of prohibitively expensive mortgages and weak demand are trying at least to rent them out. Investors who poured money into real estate during the mortgage boom are now left paying utility bills while facing the prospect of prolonged vacancies. A market that Russians were encouraged to view for years as the safest way to preserve their savings is increasingly beginning to resemble an expensive liability.

Against this backdrop, Solovyov's proposal appears as a cynical—but highly convenient—solution to two problems at once: residents of the Kursk region whose suffering undermines the Kremlin's triumphant wartime narrative, and a growing inventory of unsold apartments weighing on Russia's struggling housing market.

The Ranks of the Displaced May Soon Grow

This is where the seemingly humanitarian construction narrative begins to evoke troubling historical parallels. Forced resettlements, deportations, "evacuations," and special settlements have never been relics of the past for the Kremlin—regardless of who occupies it. They remain a well-established instrument of state policy. Under Putin, this mechanism has already been employed against Ukrainians from the occupied territories.

As early as April 2022, Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev, then head of Russia's National Defense Management Center, announced that more than one million people had been "evacuated" from Ukraine to Russia—in other words, deported. Yet even larger numbers appeared in the Kremlin's plans. According to Mizintsev, "the database contains a total of 2,753,625 requests for resettlement from 2,132 localities in Ukraine."

Western media reported at the time that the Kremlin had approved an order to relocate nearly 96,000 residents of the occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions some 5,500 miles (almost 8,900 kilometers) from their homes. The document stated that, "taking into account the situation that has developed in Ukraine," the Russian government had approved the distribution of 95,739 people among Russia's federal regions and instructed local authorities to receive them. The plan called for sending 11,400 people to Siberia, 7,200 to the Russian Far East, and more than 7,000 to the North Caucasus, including Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia.

The exact number of Ukrainians "evacuated" in this way remains impossible to establish. The occupied territories are sealed off, and Russian statistics are anything but transparent. The most widely cited estimates range from 900,000 to 1.6 million people—figures put forward in 2022 by the U.S. government and a number of international experts for those who passed through Russia's so-called filtration procedures before being forcibly transferred to Russia. Those estimates include hundreds of thousands of children.

Russian authorities, by contrast, have repeatedly claimed to have "evacuated" around 2.8 million people, including approximately 450,000 to 500,000 children.

Taken together, the available estimates suggest that at least one million people were forcibly transferred under the guise of "evacuation." Higher estimates reach between 2.5 and 3 million. None of these figures, however, can yet be considered definitively verified. Now Solovyov is proposing to add another 200,000 to 300,000 people to that tally.

Units in Putin's Strategy

From Moscow's perspective, one can at least understand the internal logic when such rhetoric is directed at Ukrainians from the temporarily occupied territories. But Solovyov is now openly advocating the "evacuation" of residents from Russia's own Kursk, Bryansk, and other frontline regions.

The proposal has, to put it mildly, startled part of Russia's own media community. As one commentator observed:

"The turbo-patriots apparently believe that ordinary people can be moved around like units in a strategy game—draw a box around them with a mouse and send them to the other end of the country in the service of some grand idea. What I don't understand is why these same turbo-patriots insisted that Ukrainians after 2014 could not simply move to Russia, yet now propose to 'relocate' people from Kursk instead."

This is where the Kremlin's narrative begins to collapse under its own contradictions.

For years, Moscow insisted that the people of Donbas could not simply move to Russia because they had homes, the graves of their ancestors, communities, memories, and land they could not abandon. According to this narrative, Russia therefore had no choice but to "protect" them—at the cost of Russian lives—and later "relocate" them at state expense.

But now an ordinary resident of the Kursk region can simply be packed off beyond the Urals or to Siberia?

The logic is unmistakably Soviet. There is a map. There is a front line. There are resources to be managed. There are empty apartments. There is demand for labor. And an individual—with a home, a dog, neighbors, and family graves—is reduced to nothing more than an inconvenient variable in a much larger administrative scheme.

In reality, Solovyov merely articulated what may already be taking shape inside the Kremlin as a policy option. That does not necessarily mean a decree ordering the mass relocation of residents from the Kursk region beyond the Urals will appear tomorrow. But the very fact that such a proposal has been floated on federal television is revealing. The war has reached Russian territory, yet the Kremlin's instinct remains the same: not to address the root cause of the problem, but to administer its consequences.

And if that means calling deportation a "state resettlement program" and a bailout for struggling property developers "saving people's lives," then that is exactly how it will be presented. There will no doubt be carefully choreographed television reports showing grateful families aboard "evacuation" trains, safely delivered to their new homes.

After all, the Kremlin has a long history of sending trains east to Siberia under the banner of necessity. The smoke from those locomotives still hangs heavily over Russia's past.

Max Meltzer