Sanctions, shadow work and a general's death: three snapshots of Russia's war economy under pressure

The EU's 19th sanctions package targets 11 crypto platforms allegedly used to move value around Russian restrictions. Russian reporting puts nearly 25 million people in informal work. And a senior Russian officer is dead in Moscow, in what looks like another targeted assassination.

By Monexus Staff Writereurope6-minute read10 Jun 2026☆ Save ↗ Share ⎙ Print

A bomb site in Moscow where a senior Russian military officer was killed, in a strike that followed a string of targeted killings inside Russia. / The New York Times

Three stories landed within four hours of one another on 10 June 2026, and they sketch a single picture more honestly than any one of them does alone. The European Union unveiled a new sanctions package aimed at eleven cryptocurrency platforms it says are being used to circumvent restrictions on Russia. Russian business daily Vedomosti published a portrait of a labour market in which roughly a quarter of the workforce operates outside the formal economy. And in Moscow, a senior Russian military officer was killed in what The New York Times framed as the latest in a string of targeted assassinations of high-profile figures inside Russia.

Read together, the three threads point at the same underlying stress: an economy and a state apparatus under simultaneous pressure from outside (sanctions, financial isolation) and from inside (a sprawling shadow labour market, a war that is killing not just soldiers but officers at home). The picture is partial — wire services and Russian domestic outlets are reporting different slices, and the gap between them is itself part of the story.

The EU's 19th package, and the crypto chokepoint

At 09:46 UTC on 10 June 2026, Cointelegraph reported that the European Commission had proposed a new sanctions package banning transactions with eleven cryptocurrency platforms and expanding measures against networks accused of helping Russia move value around existing restrictions. The proposal is the latest in a series of EU Russia packages that have, over four years, moved from targeting banks and oil price caps to named individuals, shell-company networks, and now specific digital-asset venues.

The shift is worth marking. Earlier EU packages relied on correspondent-banking pressure — cut a Russian bank off from SWIFT, cap the price of seaborne crude, and the legal economy tightens. But digital-asset rails sit largely outside that architecture. Crypto transactions can settle peer-to-peer, across chains, through mixers and non-custodial wallets that do not have a SWIFT identifier to disconnect. Sanctioning eleven named platforms is, in effect, an attempt to draw a perimeter around the on- and off-ramps — the places where crypto touches the regulated financial system — rather than around the rails themselves.

The proposal is not yet law. EU sanctions packages require unanimous agreement among member states, and previous rounds have been diluted at the Council stage. But the direction of travel is consistent: Brussels is treating crypto as sanctions infrastructure, not as a separate policy domain. The unanswered question is enforcement. Eleven platforms can be named; the question is whether the volume of Russian-sanctions-evasion traffic simply migrates to the next eleven.

A shadow workforce of nearly 25 million

Four hours later, at 13:35 UTC, Russian business newspaper Vedomosti reported — via a post by researcher Brian McDonald — that roughly 24.9 million people in Russia may be involved in informal employment, with around 5.5 million working entirely in the shadow sector. The newspaper framed the figure as further evidence of structural pressure on the Russian labour market, in which formal employment has been distorted by mobilisation, sanctions, and the flight of some Western employers.

The numbers, if accurate, are large. Twenty-four point nine million is close to a third of the Russian workforce. Even allowing for the usual methodological caveats around informal-employment measurement — definitions vary, self-reporting is unreliable, the boundary between second jobs and shadow work is fuzzy — the figure points at an economy in which a substantial share of activity happens outside the tax net, outside social-insurance contributions, and outside the legal protections that come with a formal contract.

The political-economy point is uncomfortable for the Kremlin. The formal economy is what funds the war: payroll taxes, VAT, energy revenues. A workforce that drifts into the informal sector erodes that base, even as it gives individual households a way to keep earning when formal-sector wages stagnate or sanctions bite. The two stories — the EU's sanctions tightening and the Vedomosti shadow-work estimate — are connected at exactly this point. Sanctions are designed to compress the formal economy that funds the war; the shadow economy is where the pressure leaks.

A general in Moscow

Also on 10 June 2026, The New York Times reported on the killing of a senior Russian military officer in Moscow, which the paper described as appearing to add to a string of targeted assassinations of high-profile opponents of Ukraine inside Russia. The detail available from the wire is thin — the byline is truncated in the thread that surfaced it, and the precise rank, name, and circumstances have not been independently corroborated in the materials available to Monexus at the time of writing.

What is worth noting is the pattern. Over the past two years, Russian and Ukrainian media, alongside Western wires, have reported a series of killings inside Russia of figures variously described as military officers, intelligence officials, war bloggers, and arms-industry executives. The framing of these attacks differs sharply by source. Russian state media typically attributes them to Ukrainian intelligence and treats them as terrorism on Russian soil. Ukrainian outlets, where they comment at all, treat them as legitimate actions against the personnel of a state at war with Ukraine. Western wires have generally reported the facts and declined to attribute responsibility unless an actor claims the strike.

The honest read is that attribution in most of these cases remains contested, and that several plausible readings co-exist: covert Ukrainian operations, Russian internal-security purges dressed up as foreign attacks, or private-actor violence in a society where the rule of law has been further weakened by the war. The dominant Western framing — that Ukraine is running a campaign of targeted strikes against senior figures inside Russia — is the most prominent in coverage, but it is not the only one, and the evidentiary base for any individual case is usually thin.

What the three stories say together

None of these threads, taken in isolation, is surprising. The EU has been tightening sanctions in roughly six-month cycles since 2022. Russian labour-market distortions have been a recurring theme in Russian economic commentary for at least a decade. And targeted violence inside Russia has been a feature of the war since the early months.

What is worth registering is the simultaneity. On a single day, the three pieces of evidence line up: the external pressure ratchets up (the new sanctions package); the internal economy shows the strain (the shadow-workforce numbers); and the security apparatus absorbs a hit inside the capital (the officer's death). A reader who only saw one of the three would get a partial read. Read together, the picture is of a state that is holding, with visible cost, under pressure that is structural rather than episodic.

The evidence also has clear limits. The Cointelegraph report is based on a Commission proposal that has not yet become law, and whose final form will be negotiated. The Vedomosti figures are Russian-domestic estimates whose methodology is not transparent from the wire coverage, and may overstate informal employment in either direction. The officer's death is reported but not yet attributed. A more confident version of this article would wait for corroboration; a less honest one would paper over those gaps. The honest middle is to report the pattern, name the uncertainty, and resist the temptation to over-connect threads that the available sourcing does not firmly link.

Desk note: Monexus treated the three stories as a single economic-and-security snapshot, reading them against each other rather than running them as separate wires. The dominant Western framing of the officer's death is reported, but the alternative reads — Russian internal-security action, private-actor violence, unconfirmed attribution — are named rather than buried.