Putin Wants Russian CEOs to Pay for Air Defense They Don’t Control - Newsweek

Russia’s corporate job market has a promising new growth sector, one in which hitting quarterly targets carries a rather different meaning.

Lukoil is currently advertising for a "chief specialist for protection against unmanned aerial systems" in Moscow, with a tidy monthly salary upwards of 290,000 rubles ($3,400). Here’s the link, for anyone considering a change of scenery!

The successful applicant will be expected to "search for new promising technical solutions" for protecting company facilities, including passive defenses, firing systems, interceptor drones, electronic warfare, radar, and new comms systems. It’s not the kind of job description you’d expect to see on a corporate job board, but in wartime Russia it’s just the cost of doing business.

Paying through the nose to keep Ukrainian drones away is bad enough for Russia’s corporate bosses, but now they’re being told to spend like air-defense chiefs without getting to act like them.

The Kremlin now expects companies to fund their own protection while keeping command of the wider system for itself. In Putin’s Russia, it turns out even buying your own air defense does not mean it’s yours.

The Russian government has spent 2026 building legal machinery designed to force Russian businesses to shoulder more of the burden of drone defense.

Under Federal Law 58-FZ, enacted in March, private security firms contracted by Russian companies to protect fuel-and-energy, strategic, and other designated critical facilities can receive weapons from Russia’s National Guard to counter unmanned systems.

Then Putin added the incentive scheme from hell.

Presidential Decree No. 604, signed by Putin on August 24, grants the state power to temporarily seize control of private businesses in various circumstances where owners are deemed to have failed to appropriately protect their facilities from drone attacks.

This can include situations in which the company’s anti-drone measures are found to be inadequate or have been adopted too slowly. Even if a Ukrainian drone manages to penetrate air defenses deemed adequate, the company can still be placed under temporary state administration simply for failing to recover quickly enough.

Temporary management can cover all or part of a company’s Russian property, securities, corporate stakes and property rights, and the state-appointed manager retains almost total control of the assets, excluding the ability to dispose of them.

It’s not hard to see, then, why the likes of Lukoil are racing to hire counter-drone experts. The threat of Ukrainian drones is growing larger with each passing day; now you must demonstrate to the government you’re taking all available measures—and spending plenty of money—to make sure your assets are protected. In theory, this should spare you from the Kremlin’s wrath, even if not from Kyiv’s.

But there’s a catch, and it’s a pretty big one.

In an interview with Russia’s TASS news service at the Eastern Economic Forum earlier this month, First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov said large Russian industrial companies were being incorporated into the Russian Defense Ministry’s air-defense system.

"It is important to understand that there cannot be any separate systems for detecting, warning, and repulsing attacks outside the Ministry of Defense—this would be both ineffective and unsafe," he said.

In other words, Russian companies are expected to front huge sums of cash to enhance their counter-drone capabilities, but they can only retain full control over passive measures like reinforcing buildings and anti-drone netting. Any active air defense measures, such as radar systems, electronic warfare equipment and explosive interceptor drones, can’t remain private and must be integrated into the Defense Ministry’s architecture.

For Putin, it’s a convenient arrangement; Russian businesses are now helping strengthen the national air defense networks with their own profits. For a Russian CEO, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Fail to take the required security measures, and Moscow can put your assets under temporary management. Spend the money, and your active defenses must still fit into a system coordinated by the Defense Ministry—and if they fail to stop a Ukrainian drone from hitting your property, the government can seize your company anyway.

Putin makes no attempt to hide this extractive catch-22.

Speaking at the Eastern Economic Forum on September 3, the Russian president complained that owners of Russian oil refineries previously had no obligation to spend money on air defense. "With this decree, such obligations have appeared," he said, adding that one large company he had spoken to was already spending "tens of billions of rubles" buying equipment and arranging specialist protection for its facilities.

The public procurement trail points in the same direction. Tenderplan, a Russian tender-monitoring service, counted anti-drone purchases publicly advertised across open trading platforms and found commercial-sector spending reached 441.3 million rubles ($5.25 million) in the first half of 2026, according to a report by Russian outlet Vedomosti—a six-fold increase on the same period last year.

No Russian boss has actually had their company seized under Decree 604 at the time of writing. Yet.

Manturov said earlier this month that several companies had already received several warnings from the state about perceived shortcomings in their security and in restoring damaged facilities since Putin’s decree took effect in late August. "I won't name them, but their issues will be addressed first," he said.

That would make for uncomfortable reading for any leader of a large Russian company at the best of times, but now Kyiv is piling on the pressure.

In April, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said the reach of its deep-strike weapons had expanded from roughly 390 miles in 2022 to almost 1,100 miles this year. Last month, Ukrainian forces managed to strike an oil-industry target in Tobolsk, Siberia—more than 1,350 miles away from the border—and on August 28, President Volodymyr Zelensky set his armed forces a target of increasing their current capacity of more than 300 long-range strikes a day up to 1,000.

Kyiv’s drone operators are already responding; Russia’s Defense Ministry said it intercepted a total of 777 Ukrainian drones in a single night on September 11.

Until recently, a Ukrainian drone strike already meant a brutal repair bill and a significant hit to profits for a Russian corporate boss. Now, it can invite the Russian government to investigate whether the boss deserves to keep running the facility at all.