In May 2026, war is no longer just a front line, a military bulletin or a matter of geopolitics. In Russia, it enters schools, airports, courts, telephones, children’s books, registers of ‘foreign agents’, officials’ careers, public prayers, regional budgets and even the wounded bodies of soldiers sent back to fight.

The Russian domestic chronicle between 8 and 31 May shows a more profound transformation than the mere continuation of the conflict: war becomes an environment, an administrative language, a criterion of loyalty, a mechanism of elite selection and an instrument of surveillance of society.

On 8 May, a vast wave of drones hit Groznyj, Rostov-on-Don, Perm’ and Yaroslavl’. The Ministry of Defence speaks of 264 drones shot down, but in the meantime, there are explosions in the area of the Chankala military base, fires in industrial facilities, damage to the ‘Slavneft’-JaNOS refinery and other energy plants.

The decisive fact, for Russia at home, is the effect on ordinary life: thirteen airports in the south of the country are temporarily suspended, flights cancelled, delays accumulated, air traffic warped by the war.
The vulnerability is no longer peripheral. It touches infrastructure, mobility, public communication.

On the same day, the Kremlin withdrew accreditation from several foreign media for the 9 May parade, including ARD, ZDF, Sky, AFP, RAI and NHK.
It is a symbolic gesture: the great Victory liturgy must only be reported within a controlled perimeter.

GitHub is also starting to perform worse in Russia; OONI[Open Observatory of Network Interference] records an increase in failed and anomalous connections, while the Roskomnadzor [Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media] does not formally block the entire platform but increases the number of individual pages banned.

The Ministry of Justice updates the register of ‘foreign agents’ by including, among others, the philosopher Michail Epstein, the writer Igor’ Efimov and the Cyprus Daily News website. In just one day, three plans of control are already visible: public memory, access to digital platforms, administrative stigmatisation of people and media.

On 9 May, the Victory Parade displays the new symbolic architecture of power. For the first time, soldiers from North Korea who fought in the Kursk region parade on Red Square.
Next to Putin is seated Leonid Ryžov, a participant in the war against Ukraine, and not a veteran of the Second World War.
Military technology is absent, replaced by footage of drones and nuclear submarines.
In the official speech, Putin links the feat of the victorious generation to today’s fighters and points to ‘the entire NATO bloc’ as the enemy. On the eve of the event, mobile Internet had been switched off in central Moscow.

The political use of memory appears even more starkly on the same day, in St. Petersburg, where 85-year-old Ljudmila Vasil’eva, a survivor of the siege of Leningrad, is stopped at the Solovki Rock after displaying a sign that reads: ‘Do not cover your crimes with the Victory of the People’.

The official memory of Victory becomes a closed space: it can be venerated, but not questioned. In Kemerovo, during the procession of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, a journalist addresses the mother of a missing soldier, calling her presence with her son’s photograph a ‘double celebration’.
The fragment is later cut from the recording.
Patriotic rhetoric, by dint of repetition, ends up no longer being able to distinguish mourning and celebration.

On 10 May, the repression descended to the level of minimal symbols. In Chabarovsk Zigmund Chudjakov is arrested for a T-shirt with a portrait of Boris Nemcov; in Jakutsk Artur Dron is stopped for a T-shirt with the inscription “Freedom for Udal’cov”.
On the same day, the Ministry of Education approved a concept of ‘historical education’ for kindergartens, schools, colleges and universities. The stated aim is to form a pan-Russian civic identity through initiatives on the Great Patriotic War and the memory of the participants in the war in Ukraine.

From the new school year also comes the subject ‘Spiritual and Moral Culture of Russia’, while English hours are reduced. Education becomes a space for patriotic discipline. Even the term ‘critical evaluation of information’ is absorbed into the fight against the ‘falsification of history’.

In the meantime, the head of the Human Rights Council, Valerij Fadeev, advises to contact the FSB or the prosecutor’s office in case of doubt when citing ‘undesirable’ Western universities, such as Yale, Stanford and Berkeley. Bibliographic citation becomes a potential administrative risk.

On 11 May, an investigation revealed that at least 50 billion roubles were spent on the military preparation of students: ‘Avangard’ centres, ‘Voin’ centres, training with weapons, drones, tactics and battlefield assistance. From 1 September 2023, military rallies are a compulsory part of the ‘Fundamentals of Security and Defence of the Fatherland’ course. Parents and students speak of pressure and difficulty in refusing.
The school no longer just prepares citizens: it prepares bodies available for war.

On 12 May, the Rosmolodëž’ [Federal Agency for Youth Affairs] announced a nearly 100 million rouble digital platform for communicating with teenagers and young people through messengers and chatbots.

The official language speaks of ’empathic and personalised’ support , of ‘moral and spiritual development’, of help in life situations. The structure, however, provides for centralised data storage, monitoring and control. The state does not just educate: it wants to listen, to file, to interpret vulnerabilities and questions.

On the same day, the General Prosecutor’s Office demanded the confiscation of assets worth over 5.5 billion roubles from former First Deputy Defence Minister Ruslan Calikov: real estate, land, accounts, military procurement activities.
Calikov was one of Sergei Šojgu’s closest collaborators. In the following days, the court confirmed the confiscation.
The case is part of a wider decomposition of the old military apparatus: after the arrival of Andrej Belousov at the Ministry of Defence, at least 19 senior officials of the department became defendants in criminal proceedings.

The war does not erase corruption; it makes it more visible, more dangerous for internal balances, more useful in power struggles.

Also on 12 May, platforms such as Litres and Ozon began marking children’s books – from ‘Crocodile Gena’ to ‘Old Chottabyč‘, from ‘The Hobbit‘ to ‘Peter Pan‘ – with drug warnings.
In later days, the same happens to cookery books and classics.
Legislation on ‘propaganda’ produces a grotesque universe, where fairytale formulas, potions and fantastic vocabulary can be treated as normative deviations.
The control is not only political: it becomes semantic, preventive, ridiculous and precisely for this reason invasive.

On 14 May, the FSIN [Federal Service for the Execution of Sentences] acknowledged for the first time that the fall in the number of prisoners is linked to the possibility of signing a contract with the Ministry of Defence and going off to war.
From about 465,000 prisoners at the end of 2021, the number has dropped to about 282,000. The authorities had spoken of ‘humanising’ the penal system; now a more concrete explanation emerges: the colonies have also been emptied to feed the front.

On the same day, Jana Lantratova was appointed as the new civic defender for human rights. Her political biography includes restrictions on video games, the fight against ‘LGBT propaganda’, support for the army’s ‘fake’ laws, visits to occupied territories and Ukrainian accusations of involvement in the forced deportation of children.
The institutional figure called upon to protect rights thus appears integrated into the securitarian language of power.

On 15 May, the mobilisation market emerges.
According to ‘Važnye istorii‘ [Important Stories], Russian regions have already spent at least 7.7 billion roubles in bonuses for recruiting contractors. In some areas, more than 500 thousand roubles are promised for each man brought to the war; not only private citizens but also employees of administrations, police, FSIN and FSB can receive money.
The mobilisation becomes a local economy. Meanwhile, the VCIOM records an upturn in Putin’s ratings after a change in polling methodology, while General Aleksandr Lapin, criticised in the past by Prigožin and Kadyrov for military failures, is allowed to move to the Duma and lead the Defence Committee.

The governor of Vologda proposes to celebrate the participants in the SVO [‘special military operation’] on a par with the veterans of the Great Patriotic War: the fighter in Ukraine is presented as the new moral elite.

From 16 to 18 May, the chronicle shows a society forced to normalise abnormality. In Moscow, actor Aleksandr Anisimov is stopped and fined for reading Esenin in front of the reception room of the presidential administration during an animal rights action.

The ecologist project ‘Zemlja kasaetsja každogo‘ [The Earth Concerns Everyone] effectively suspends its work after the association ‘Ochrana prirody‘ [Protection of Nature] is recognised as a ‘foreign agent’.
In Kabardino-Balkaria dozens of people receive warnings from the police against taking part in the march in memory of the victims of the Caucasus war. In St. Petersburg, three leaders of the Crimean-Tatar children’sensemble ‘Nefes’ are detained because, during a photograph at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, they were carrying the flag of the Crimean Tatars, which is officially not banned.

In the meantime, the ‘Veter’ project [Wind] reports that at least 319 seriously wounded Russian servicemen have been sent back to the front without having completed treatment and rehabilitation; in more than 80 per cent of the cases, coercion is mentioned.
In Belgorod, compensation for cars damaged by bombing was suspended: more than 15 thousand vehicles affected since the beginning of the war, but the fund is empty.

In Perm’ priests walk around the city with the icon of the Mother of God ‘Permskaya ‘ to pray against the drone threat, as they had prayed against the Covid during the pandemic.
The technological Russia of drones coexists with the liturgical Russia of defensive processions, with the administrative Russia of depleted funds, and with the coercive Russia of the wounded sent back to fight.

On 19 May, the digital dimension returns to centre stage.
An analysis of the APK file of the state-owned messenger Max reveals data collection and possible surveillance functions: access to contacts and installed applications, audio recording, screenshots, message deletion, geolocation, voice identification, transmission without end-to-end encryption .

The app, developed by VK on behalf of the authorities, is administratively promoted, while WhatsApp and Telegram are blocked or restricted. On the same day, communist deputy Renat Sulejmanov declares that the economy will not withstand a prolonged war, as around 40% of the federal budget now goes to defence and security. In Voronež, activist Kirill Derevsky denounces torture with electric shocks and beatings after a police raid on an urban planners’ meeting. In St. Petersburg, wards for people wounded in the war against the Ukraine are operating in many large civil hospitals.

On 20 May, propaganda entered the school and politics again. Actor Dmitry Djužev, an active supporter of the war, registers for the primaries of ‘Edinaja Rossija’ [United Russia] in Moscow.
A new school social science textbook for the ninth grade, edited by Dmitry Medvedev, shows a map of Russia that includes Kherson and the entire Zaporižžja region, including areas not controlled by the Russian army.
Russia is described as the ‘leader of the new world order’, while social and messaging apps appear as potential threats.

At a college in Krasnoyarsk female students are invited to join BPLA [drone] units, with requirements of age between 18 and 34, no children and no convictions. The female body is evoked together as a military resource and as a reproductive future.

On 21 May, a Russian soldier, Artëm Lipezin, was sentenced to five years in prison for shooting himself twice in the foot with an AK-12 in order to avoid returning to the combat zone.
“Rostelekom’ presents ‘Lešij connect’, a system to remotely manage home routers and modems for millions of users.

Rosfinmonitoring [Federal Service for Financial Monitoring] places the opponent Vladimir Milov on the list of “terrorists and extremists”. In Belgorod, a man is fined 50 thousand roubles for a satirical image of Putin with prison tattoos posted on Telegram.
Social anger also appears in the comments to Šojgu’s daughter’s birthday post: accusations of theft, corruption, responsibility for the war.

On 22 May, Bloomberg writes that disquiet is growing in the Russian elite over the continuation of the war: some officials consider the conflict to be at an impasse, while Putin would only like to end it by the end of 2026 under conditions that can only be presented as a victory.
The FOM[Fond obščestvennoe mnenie, Public Opinion Foundation], close to the Kremlin, records a drop in Putin’s approval to 71%, while the VCIOM, after a change in methodology, presents opposite figures.

In St Petersburg, 8th grade pupils are given a compulsory assignment on drones: classification, structure, models, practical use and programming basics.
At the Institute of Philosophy of the RAN [Russian Academy of Sciences], searches are carried out in a fraud case related to the ‘Nasledie Aristotelja’ [Aristotle’s Legacy] project, financed with some 52 million roubles. Humanistic science is also dragged into an investigative climate.

On 23 May, Garri Kasparov is declared internationally wanted by Russia, on charges in absentia of ‘justification of terrorism’ and violation of the legislation on ‘foreign agents’.
In Kaliningrad, a report with images of the arrest of the lawyer Marija Boncler, accused of state treason, is broadcast on screens at bus stops.

Boncler, known for defending political prisoners and defendants in anti-war cases, has been in SIZO [remand centre] for about a year and suffers from chronic illnesses. The defence claims that communicating with her by posing as a Ukrainian agent was an FSB employee.

Apple announces that, at the request of the Roskomnadzor, it will remove 1213 apps from the Russian App Store in 2025, probably mostly VPNs.
The Rospotrebnadzor [Federal Service for the Protection of Consumer Rights and Human Welfare] bans Armenian wines, cognac and mineral water, while relations between Moscow and Yerevan deteriorate.
At Cannes, Andrei Zvjagincev’s ‘Minotavr‘ receives the Grand Prix; from the stage the director addresses Putin and asks him to stop the war.

On 24 May, the Russian reaction to Zvjagincev’s speech came immediately: Vitalij Borodin proposed recognising him as a ‘foreign agent’.
In St. Petersburg a performer at the Mariinsky Theatre shoots out of the window with an air pistol at an eleven-year-old boy playing the saxophone in the street, wounding him in the face.

World actions in memory of Aleksej Naval’nyj are announced for 4 June. Outside Russia,the president of the Serbian parliament Ana Brnabić declares that Russia is not a ‘brother’ country and calls the war against Ukraine ‘a pure act of aggression’; Macron phones Lukašenko and urges him not to intervene in the Russian war.
Even the international environment closest to Moscow begins to show cracks and distance.

On 25 May, OONI records the deterioration of access in Russia to the main gaming platforms and developers’ sites: Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Epic Games, Origin, Electronic Arts, Blizzard.
In Tatarstan, a bill is prepared to fine companies that do not comply with recruitment quotas for war participants. Oleg Savel’ev, the first deputy appointed after Belousov’s arrival, leaves the Ministry of Defence.

In the Czech Republic, the Metropolitan Ilarion, Grigory Alfeev, formerly one of the most influential hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church and close to Kirill, was stopped: containers with a white substance, later recognised as drugs, were found in his car.
Putin signs the law allowing the army to be used to protect Russian citizens detained abroad on the basis of foreign or international court decisions. Almost the whole of central Russia is closed to small aviation and business jets, officially because of the drone threat.

On 26 May, the Roskomnadzor fined 85 telecommunication operators for not passing on data on users’ IP addresses: officially they are used against cyber attacks and DDoS, but they can also detect the use of VPNs.
FSB director Aleksandr Bortnikov speaks of Western ‘digital laboratories’ in the CIS countries, accused of collecting social data and using artificial intelligence to influence public opinion.

In the case of journalist Marija Ponomarenko, an FSIN employee admits that he used force against her, but claims he wanted to prevent a suicide; Ponomarenko recounts that she was pressed against a table, thrown to the floor, crushed with a knee and pulled by the hair.

The VCIOM registers the highest level of protest moods since the beginning of the war: 14% of respondents say they would be likely to participate in protests against the decline in living standards and in defence of their rights. The court refuses to examine the complaint of Azat Miftachov’s wife against the inaction of the investigation into the torture reported by the political prisoner. It is also discovered that Andrej Kijco, the ‘maniac of Sosnovo’, convicted of murder and rape, had been sent to war on a contract from the Ministry of Defence and then escaped from a military hospital.

On 27 May, the Mincifry [Ministry of Digital Development] expands the list of data that operators must provide to force facilities: passports, addresses, INN [tax code], bank details, IP, domains, logins, geolocation and other technical information.

In Moscow, Ksenija Belousova is sentenced to more than three years in prison for a video with a hookah on a kulič [Orthodox Easter cake], accused of “offending the feelings of believers”.
The Ukrainian police release new details about the death of the journalist Viktorija Roščyna, detained in Russia: fractured occipital bone, evidence of beatings, electric shocks, knife wounds, inhuman conditions and pressure to sing the Russian anthem.
The body is returned to Ukraine without eyes, brain and part of the larynx, referred to by the Russian side as an ‘unidentified man’.

Russian Telegram channels lose almost half of their views after messenger restrictions.
Russia signs military-technical cooperation agreement with the Taliban.

The Matvienko family sues Italian journalist Massimiliano Coccia over an investigation into the family’s European assets: this is not the direct application of Russian law abroad, but a transnational use of judicial instruments to put pressure on those investigating the assets of elites.

On 28 May, the CIK [Central Election Commission] began to decommission the KOIB [ballot card scanners], officially for wear and tear, sanctions and security; according to ‘Vedomosti’ sources, elections could be held in 2026 without these automated systems.

In Nizhny Novgorod, a drone or its fragments damaged the roof of the regional court; shortly afterwards, the creation of a ‘ministry for the protection of targets‘ was announced in the region.

SHAMAN releases a video clip in which artificial intelligence-generated images of Russian emigrants and ‘foreign agents’ – Zemfira, Jurij Dud’, Noize MC, Oxxxymiron, Chodorkovskij and others – sing its song ‘Rossija – mama’.
The Rossel’choznadzor [Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance] announces new restrictions on vegetables and strawberries from Armenia.

In France, accounts are seized in connection with the sale of a villa on the Côte d’Azur that investigators suspect covertly belongs to Deputy Prime Minister Tat’jana Golikova and her husband Viktor Christenko. Russian companies are allowed to buy anti-aircraft weaponry to defend themselves against drones. An investigation reports that Putin and Kabaeva spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on foreign rulers for their children, educated in English and German as ‘educated Europeans’.

On 29 May, a Russian drone entered Romanian airspace during an attack against Ukraine and crashed on the roof of a house in Galați, injuring two people.
Bucharest calls the incident a serious escalation, informs the EU and NATO, asks for anti-drone systems, then announces the closure of the Russian consulate in Constanta and declares the consul general persona non grata.

On the same day, drones hit the Volgograd region and the Jaroslavl’ region. In dozens of Russian regions, from Central Russia to the Urals, a missile threat is declared; in some cities, public transport stops and kindergarten children are evacuated to shelters.

The Ministry of Justice again updates the register of ‘foreign agents’, including the writer El’vira Barjakina, Inna Kuročkina and the political scientist Andrei Nikulin.

On 30 May, Russia recalled Ambassador to Armenia Sergei Kopyrkin to Moscow for consultations, justifying the decision with Yerevan’s rapprochement to the European Union.
After the start of Armenia’s EU accession path and the presence of Zelens’kyj in Yerevan, Moscow intensified political and economic pressure: Putin, Lukašenko, Tokaev and Žaparov asked Armenia to choose between the EU and EAÈS [Eurasian Economic Union], while the Russian authorities threatened to review gas and oil supplies.

According to ‘Važnye istorii’, at least 17 candidates in the ‘United Russia’ primaries falsely claimed the status of SVO participants in order to gain an internal advantage of 25% of the vote.
Some belonged to the ‘Kaskad’ detachment, used by officials and deputies to appear at the front while remaining in the rear. The Roskomnadzor blocks on Russian platforms ‘Spjaščaja krasavica ‘ [Sleeping Beauty] by Noize MC against Guf.

The Wall Street Journal writes about Russia’s state programme against ageing, launched by the Kremlin in 2024 for $26 billion and overseen by Putin’s daughter Marija Voroncova and the head of the Kurčatov Institute: gene therapy, organ bioprinting, growing human organs in mini-pigs.

At the Borisovskoe cemetery in Moscow, a panichida, an Orthodox rite of remembrance of the dead, was held for Aleksej Naval’nyj; it was celebrated by the priest Dmitry Safronov, who had already been banned from the ministry for previous services in memory of the opponent.

Drones attack oil infrastructure in three Russian regions on 31 May. In Saratov, the tank farm of the Rosneft’ refinery burns down: according to Astra, it is at least the sixteenth attack against the facility since the beginning of the war. In the Matveevo-Kurgan district, in the Rostov region, a fuel depot for agricultural enterprises burns down, with the evacuation of the nearby inhabitants. In the Uržum district, in the Kirov region, the LPDS ‘Lazarevo’ [linear production and dispatching station], on a Transneft’ pipeline, is hit. A fire also breaks out there, with no injuries reported.

May 2026 thus shows a Russia in which the boundary between the front and everyday life has almost dissolved.

The war enters schools, courts, telephones, regional budgets, culture, the Church, the registers of ‘foreign agents’ and even the bodies of prisoners and wounded soldiers.
Power continues to present itself as compact and victorious, but the chronicles reveal a more fragile, guarded and nervous country: vulnerable infrastructure, elites under pressure, growing repression and a society forced to live in permanent mobilisation.
The question is no longer just how long the war against Ukraine will last, but how deeply it will have transformed Russia itself.