*points d’appui* (support settlements)

How war and sanctions are reshaping how Russia governs its vast territory

<p>As the world’s largest country that spans eleven time zones and shares land borders with fourteen countries, <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/russia-1376">Russia</a>’s geography has always posed a difficult problem for government: how to maintain economic activity, infrastructure and basic services across an enormous territory with a highly uneven population.</p> <p>More than <a href="https://theconversation.com/ukraine-after-four-years-of-war-exhaustion-on-both-sides-is-the-main-hope-for-peace-276783">four and a half years of war against Ukraine</a>, sanctions and disrupted international connections have made that challenge considerably harder.</p> <p>One place where the response to these mounting pressures is becoming visible is Russia’s national spatial policy.</p> <p>In my <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275126007328">newly published research</a> with Anton Gorodnichev, we compare Russia’s 2019 and <a href="https://en.highnorthnews.c