The decree has been published on the official portal of legal information and enters into force 180 days after publication, in March 2027. The delay is explained in the accompanying materials by the need for agencies to amend their own regulations, TASS reported.
In penal colonies the daily meat allowance will rise from 90 to 100 grams, and vegetable oil from 20 to 25 grams. Inmates will receive an additional 10 grams of butter a day. Vegetables will be increased to 320 grams a day from April to September, up from 250 grams, and to 340 grams from October to March, of which 150 grams must be cabbage. The fish allowance remains 100 grams a day, but is now specified as gutted and headless.
Suspects and defendants held in pretrial detention facilities of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIS) and the Federal Security Service (FSB), as well as in temporary detention facilities of FSB border agencies, will receive an additional 10 grams of butter a day, 100 grams of cottage cheese and two chicken eggs a week. Once a week they are entitled to one fresh apple weighing between 135 and 200 grams. The apple may be replaced by 150 milliliters of juice.
The cuts affect both categories. For convicted men the potato allowance falls from 550 to 300 grams a day, and for men in pretrial detention from 500 to 300 grams. The bread allowance for men in both groups will be reduced by 100 grams. Salt will be 8 grams a day instead of 15–20 grams for convicts and 15 grams in pretrial detention. Less margarine will be provided.
The materials accompanying the decree state that after the changes the prisoners' diet will meet Rospotrebnadzor's methodological recommendations for macronutrients and calorie content.
The revision of food norms was discussed at a meeting of the Justice Ministry board by the head of the ministry, Konstantin Chuichenko. He mentioned butter, eggs, cottage cheese and fresh fruit, and proposed cooking for convicts with iodized salt, "which is especially important in the northern regions and regions with iodine deficiency."
Human rights activist Olga Romanova told Ekho that the change in food norms looks reasonable, but the main question is how it will be implemented. According to her, cutting bread, potatoes, margarine or salt is extremely simple: these are cheap products bought in bulk, and their quantity can easily be reduced as soon as the new norms take effect. But providing every person with cottage cheese, eggs, butter, fresh vegetables and apples is far more difficult and expensive — it is a different purchase, different logistics, storage, shelf life and, most importantly, money.
Romanova believes the outcome may be this: the old, cheap part of the diet will be cut immediately, while the new part will appear intermittently or be substituted. She recalled that prisoners pay for their upkeep, including food, from wages, pensions or other income, and that these costs will rise under the new norms. According to her, a person pays for food but is practically unable to verify what exactly the money was deducted for: he does not see procurement documents, cannot check the actual weight of products, and does not know how much cottage cheese, butter, eggs or apples were purchased for the institution and how much reached the kitchen. Romanova noted that in the Russian prison system, including an apple in a prisoner's menu, deducting payment for that apple from the prisoner's account, and the apple actually given to him are three different things that may not depend on each other.
As RBC recalls, back in the autumn of 2025 Chuichenko advocated improving conditions in pretrial detention facilities. He pointed out that the guilt of those in penal colonies has already been proven, while in pretrial detention people are only being isolated from society.
The number of prisoners in Russian jails has fallen to a minimum since the early 2000s after the mass dispatch of people to the war. In May, the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service, Arkady Gostev, said that 282,000 people were in places of deprivation of liberty, of whom 85,000 were in pretrial detention facilities and premises operating in pretrial detention regime. In total, during the war the prison population has shrunk by 183,000 people. At the same time, the government plans to build seven multi-regime prisons with a total capacity of more than 20,000 people by 2035. According to Justice Ministry calculations, the use of such facilities will reduce spending on the upkeep of convicts and defendants by 25–30%.