Vladimir Putin has signed a decree giving the state the right to impose temporary administration over critical infrastructure if private owners fail to protect it from drone attacks or do not restore it to operation quickly enough after a strike. The decree is numbered 604 and was signed on 24 August.

The list of what it covers is not short. The fuel and energy complex, industry, telecommunications, utilities, transport and logistics infrastructure, power generation including nuclear facilities, plus anything else deemed vital to the security and functioning of the state. In other words, almost everything that works.

The mechanism is triggered when authorities judge that protective measures against drones are ineffective, or when an owner fails to restore operations after a strike, or does so too slowly. Temporary administration can cover movable and immovable property, securities, ownership stakes and other property rights. Management is normally taken over by the Federal Agency for State Property Management, unless Putin decides otherwise.

First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov rushed to explain that this is not nationalisation and that there is no formal change of ownership, but targeted management for specific security tasks and without broad application. Formally, correct. But when the state can take management of your factory away because it decided by itself that you were slow to restore it, the word written on the paper matters less than who holds the decision.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov made no attempt to hide the reason. He linked the decree directly to the increasingly frequent Ukrainian drone strikes deep inside Russia and said that owners of enterprises often neglect adequate anti-drone measures. Moscow, he confirmed, plans to tighten requirements on companies regarding security assessments.

The numbers behind that explanation are specific. Ukraine has expanded its strikes on Russian refineries and on the logistics of energy facilities, but also on large retail systems. Six Ozon logistics centres were attacked in three days, four of them on 24 August alone across several regions. Ozon's share price fell by almost 30 per cent. The decree was signed on the same day as those four attacks. That is not a coincidence of timing, it is a reaction.

What this document actually says is different from what Manturov says. A war that was supposed to stay outside the borders now requires a legal mechanism for governing inside them. When a state has to grant itself the right to take over its own factories in order to keep them running, that is not a sign of strength. It is an admission that the strikes are landing and that the system does not hold on its own.