Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Russia’s rear cities keep waking up to Ukrainian drones, and the Kremlin is running out of hands to point at the sky.
More than four years into the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s air-defense map has been quietly redrawn around oil refineries, power stations, and provincial capitals hit by long-range strikes.
Regional governors have been building reservist units to plug the gaps, and the Defense Ministry has already eased psychiatric standards to keep bodies in uniform.
Now President Vladimir Putin has signaled that the pool can shrink no further without reaching into categories the state itself has long deemed unfit for any service.
In a televised exchange, Putin endorsed a proposal by state broadcaster VGTRK correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny to let people classified as Category D, a status covering blindness, deafness in both ears, and schizophrenia, volunteer in regional BARS drone-defense units.
“Zhenya, I support it,” Putin told Poddubny, who leads the United Russia electoral list, adding that he would take the idea to the General Staff and the Defense Ministry.
The category that exists to keep people out
Category D is the strictest of Russia’s five military fitness ratings. It is assigned during medical examinations to people with severe, irreversible conditions and removes them from the draft entirely.
Poddubny told Putin that wounded soldiers themselves had raised the request, arguing that a core group of Category D volunteers had assessed their own limits and wanted to serve in local units defending facilities from drones rather than at the front.
It is unclear what the wounded soldiers, Poddubny is referring to, are suffering from.
The Institute for the Study of War, cited by Ukrainian outlet UNN, placed the exchange in the context of Russian air defense struggling to protect the country’s vast rear “due to a lack of air defense systems, a shortage of personnel, and problems coordinating between civilian and military authorities.”
Putin also said the air-defense effort needs a single commander rather than a coordination center.
Standards already sliding
The proposal lands after Moscow spent much of the past year rewriting who counts as fit to fight.
Amendments to the government’s Regulation on Military Medical Expertise, adopted in August 2025 and reported by Verstka in November, downgraded endogenous psychoses such as schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorders from “unfit” to “limited fitness.”
Chronic alcoholism and alcohol-induced psychoses were moved to “fit with minor restrictions.”
An anonymous military psychiatrist quoted in that investigation said the change was driven by simple arithmetic: “the fit resource is running out.”
Regional drone units built in a hurry
The BARS units Poddubny wants to open up are part of a rapidly expanding parallel force.
According to Kommersant, cited by The Moscow Times on November 10, 2025, at least 20 Russian regions had begun recruiting reservists to guard strategic infrastructure, with Tatarstan and Bashkortostan forming specialized detachments for oil refineries and petrochemical sites.
Putin signed a decree on December 30, 2025, ordering special assemblies of mobilization reservists to defend critical infrastructure throughout 2026.
No formal decree has been issued yet to enact Poddubny’s proposal. The next step, per Putin’s own instruction on camera, sits with the Defense Ministry and the General Staff.
