Key Points
- Multiple Russian regional governors are pushing for local vape sales bans with direct backing from President Vladimir Putin.
- A nationwide vape ban remains stalled, as federal legislation has repeatedly failed or been delayed in the State Duma.
- New legislation under review seeks to restrict nicotine product sales at public transport stops, marking a limited step forward.
- Critics warn of fiscal fallout and illicit market growth if a blanket ban is imposed too quickly.
2Firsts, October 28, 2025(By Vladislav Vorotnikov) — Russia’s anti-vaping drive is gaining momentum at the regional level, as governors rush to implement local vape bans — a movement now backed by President Vladimir Putin. While federal legislation continues to stall, regional authorities are turning up enforcement, fueling a national debate over youth protection, tax revenue, and regulatory strategy.
Regional Push Gains Presidential Support
Sergey Melikov, the governor of the Dagestan Republic in southern Russia, has publicly appealed to the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, to appoint the republic one of the pilot regions for the experiment of banning the sale of vapes, the press office of the Dagestan administration said in a statement on its social media channels on October 20.
Amid a decline in cigarette consumption, the use of vapes is on the rise in Russia, Melikov said, as quoted in the statement. The main users of vapes are adolescents, which shows that the existing restrictions on their sale are not sufficient, he added.
"I suppose that the introduction of such a ban [on selling vapes] will lower the vaping-related population morbidity," Melikov claimed.
The initiative to allow Russian regions to independently impose restrictions on the sale of vapes, discussed last year, got a new breath of life thanks to Nizhny Novgorod Governor Gleb Nikitin, who put the idea forward during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 23.
Again, Nikitin cited protecting the health of the young generation as one of the key rationales for the move.
"Firstly, the problem [of vape consumption] is getting younger, and secondly, it's being taken for granted, accepted as something normal," Nikitin noted.
In response, Putin strongly supported the proposal.
"Consider me agreeing to this right away. It's a good proposal," Putin said.
The Vologda region is also expected to be one of the first regions where vapes will be banned, since the regional governor, Georgy Philimonnov, is known as one of the ardent opponents of e-cigarettes.
In an interview with RBC, a Russian business publication on May 23, Philimonnov described vapes as "a weapon of genocide" and revealed that the Vologda region has also become a trailblazer in restricting their sales through administrative pressure on vape shops.
"As we have no regulation and no delegated authority [to lawfully restrict operations of vape shops], we will be probing every single store for violations," Philimonnov claimed.
Indeed, vape shops across the Vologda region experienced a surge in pressure due to a rising number of sanitary, firefighting, and tax inspections over the last several months.
Back-and-Forth
Before the August 23 meeting, the initiative to allow regions to prohibit the sale of vapes was considered a failure.
The draft bill originally registered on December 4, 2024, in the State Duma was rejected during a meeting on July 10, 2025.
Over the past year, Russian legislators have been consistently tightening the screws on the vape industry, refraining from resorting to a complete ban.
On October 21, the State Duma supported in the first reading the bill prohibiting the advertisement of nicotine-containing products at public transport stops.
The bill is called to reduce "the territorial availability of tobacco and vaping products and contribute to a reduction in nicotine consumption among the population", the legislators said in an explanatory note to the bill.
However, the total ban on vapes, repeatedly promised by Russian healthcare officials and State Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin, is being consistently delayed.
In a statement on his social media channels on August 23, Volodin pledged to drag the total ban through the Russian Parliament within two months. To justify this measure, he said that according to the opinion poll conducted on his social media, around 74% of respondents backed the idea of prohibiting the sale of vapes.
The anti-vaping campaign in Russia is sluggish, as it has an economic dimension in addition to the social one.
In 2025, the Russian budget expects to collect a solid Rub 50 billion ($620 million) in additional taxes from the introduction of an excise tax on nicotine raw materials and tobacco-free nicotine-containing mixtures, estimated Health Nation, a health-protecting NGO lobbying for a nationwide ban on the sale of vapes in Russia.
However, despite the preparations to pass the right to regulate the vaping market to the regions, the nationwide ban on selling vapes is still on the agenda.
The fate of a bill banning vapes will be decided by the end of 2025, Sergey Leonov, chairman of the State Duma committee on Health Protection, was quoted as saying in a statement published in the Parliament Gazette, the Russian Parliament's official publication, on September 10.
"If the sale of vapes is banned, they will disappear from the legal market. Some say that would create a black market. But even now, when everything is legal, 60% of the products sold are counterfeit," Leonov said.
"Once the ban is in place, the counterfeit market will substantially shrink. But most importantly, children will be unable to access them. They won't be able to buy vapes in underground passages, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs will have grounds to punish those selling vapes, since it will now be a prohibited activity," Leonov said.
A Shot in the Foot
The Russian business community remains skeptical about the prospects of the introduction of the ban on vapes, both at the regional and federal levels.
The vape market in Russia has grown too large, so its closure will entail substantial losses for the Russian budget, a vape seller who wished not to be named told a local Novgorod news outlet, NN.
"Almost every second person [in Russia] smokes. If they shut everything down, they'll essentially shoot themselves in the foot by cutting off a significant portion of their tax revenue," the source said.
"I think this is simply someone's political ploy to score points before some election. And once they realize how many taxes have gone into the gray zone, they will change their minds. Instead of receiving money, they'll be shortchanged because they'll have to spend resources on controlling the gray zone. That's economic suicide," the source added.
The initiative to allow Russian regions to independently ban the sale of vapes is not a win, but rather a fiasco for the big tobacco companies that have been lobbying for restrictions on vapes over the last few years, Nikita Krichevsky, a doctor of economic science at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told NN.
Any localized and unpredictable effects of the regional ban can eventually bury any prospects of expanding the experiment nationwide, Krichevsky noted.
"It appears that Nikitin has scaled back the previous campaign against the entire market, compressing it to a single region," Krichevsky said.
From Regional Trials to National Policy?
On the other hand, some analysts believe that regional experiments can pave the way for broader restrictions on vape sales.
"A complete ban on vaping should be introduced gradually, in specific regions and as a pilot project, along with a comprehensive oversight mechanism, so that this practice can then be rolled out nationwide," noted Alexander Mitryuk, a member of the Association of Lawyers of Russia.
According to Mitryuk, the gradual regional restrictions on vapes can become a viable alternative to what happened in Kazakhstan, where the initiative to ban vapes has gone sideways, as the number of smokers has not decreased, but the gray market has flourished instead.
Cover image generated by ChatGPT.
