moscow Is Taking Insulin from the Unemployable

russian authorities have officially acknowledged that they cannot provide subsidized medication to all patients with diabetes, and have used this as a basis for prioritizing patients. Priority access to medications will now be given to the “most able-bodied” – those whose treatment, according to officials’ logic, is “economically justified”.

This category includes 105,500 russians under the age of 60 with type 2 diabetes who have heart or kidney complications but have not been granted disability status yet. The rest – about one million people out of approximately 5.5 million patients who need blood-sugar-lowering medications – have effectively been excluded from state care. The regime has no interest in the disabled, the elderly, or those deemed “economically inefficient”.

This is not an emergency – it is the norm. In winter, medications disappeared in yekaterinburg and orenburg; in the autumn, – in volgograd, vladimir, and ulyanovsk regions. In the transbaikal territory, the shortage became so critical that people were forced to relocate to gain access to life-saving medicines.

The kremlin makes no secret of its logic: the war is consuming resources, and citizens who cannot return the investment in the form of labor or taxes are becoming a burden. A state that officially ranks the sick according to their economic utility has turned cannibalism into a bureaucratic procedure.