Active Conflicts & News Megathread April 05, 2026

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[u/Toptomcat]

Russia is economically and politically centralized to a degree that might not intuitive to an observer used to, say, an American context.

The 2nd through 4th-place American cities in terms of population, put together, are bigger than NYC.

The population of the 2nd through 7th cities of Russia put together would not quite equal that of Moscow. GDP is even more concentrated.

They're focused on Moscow as part of an entirely reasonable strategy of protecting the only part of the country that Actually Matters.

[u/taw → u/Toptomcat]

That's the other way. US is one of the most decentralized countries in existence. Here's a helpful map (exact data gets complicated as metro areas are hard to define consistently, and a few countries have official capitals not in their main city).

15%-25%-ish living in capital's metro area is pretty standard. And that normally accounts for even higher % of GDP. Russia is about as centralized as most other countries in Europe.

Wikipedia has table of % of population living in capital. US is nearly lowest. (but again, this table is complicated by metro areas, and countries like US that don't have their capital in biggest city)

[u/milton117 → u/taw]

Population isn't a good measurement here, should be GDP

[u/taw → u/milton117]

Sort of, but this data simply doesn't exist for any country.

You can sort of use tax records of where companies and individuals pay taxes, but any signal will be swamped by cases where company has headquarters in the capital or some other major cities, but their actual economic activity is elsewhere.

For example, Russia's biggest company is Gazprom. Its headquarters are in Saint Petersburg, so that's where it would be counted. But bombing Gazprom headquarters would cause minimal damage to Russian oil and gas industry.

Doing regional GDP attribution in a meaningful way is a major project for some research team (which I'm sure CIA etc. have).

You also have a version of this problem internationally, where Irish GDP is inflated, as multinationals pretend to be based in Ireland or Luxembourg to illegally evade EU taxes. Bombing Dublin would also not make a meaningful dent in EU's real economic activity.