Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s warning against putting Russia’s entire economy on a wartime footing is striking not because he has become an opponent of the Kremlin, but because he has publicly articulated a problem the Kremlin can no longer easily conceal: Russia’s war machine increasingly risks consuming the civilian economy that sustains it. Sobyanin remains one of the most powerful figures inside Vladimir Putin’s political system. He is no dissident, and his comments should not be mistaken for opposition to the war itself.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. What makes them significant is that they amount to an unusually explicit rejection of the hardline argument that Russia should mobilize virtually every available economic resource for war. “We constantly hear talk that the entire economy needs to be mobilized, redirected toward the war, and so on,” Sobyanin said in an interview with TASS Director General Andrey Kondrashov broadcast on Aug. 5. “But the modern economy is structured differently,” he said. “If there is no economy of peaceful life itself, there will be no taxes, no income for the population... And to kill life, to kill the normal economy, is to kill the country itself.” Sobyanin is effectively warning that Russia cannot endlessly expand military production, defense spending and wartime mobilization without eventually undermining the tax base, consumer economy and living standards that allow the state to function.