Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug

Khanty-Mansi exists because oil exists beneath the Ob River marshlands. The 1965 Samotlor discovery—one of the world's largest oil fields, now having produced 2.67 billion tonnes—transformed a region of 1.7 million square kilometers from indigenous hunting grounds into the source of 60% of Russian oil production. Surgut grew from Arctic outpost to 396,000 residents; Nizhnevartovsk and Nefteyugansk followed similar trajectories. The cities are consequences of the crude beneath them.

The infrastructure that extraction requires created secondary economies. Surgut GRES-2, the world's largest gas-fired power plant at 5,600 megawatts, powers refineries and extraction operations. The autonomous okrug ranks first among Russian regions in electricity generation—a necessity when everything from drilling to housing requires power in permafrost conditions. The 2024 leadership transition from Natalya Komarova to Ruslan Kukharuk continued rather than disrupted extraction logic.

Yet extraction creates costs that extraction cannot pay. Surgutneftegaz lost 400 billion rubles in early 2025. Indigenous Khanty communities have filed complaints for decades about oil infrastructure built on ancestral lands without consent. The 2024 "Public Radar" proposal to amend legislation on traditional land use acknowledged problems that persist despite acknowledgment.

**By 2026**, Khanty-Mansi will test whether oil wealth can address what oil extraction damages. Indigenous land rights, environmental remediation, and post-extraction economic planning require investment that competes with production expansion. Whether Russia's oil heartland develops sustainable transition strategies—or whether it extracts until extraction is no longer profitable, then abandons—depends on whether extraction revenue funds anything beyond more extraction.