Russian media are reporting that Putin today signed the decree on the new organizational division of the Russian Armed Forces.

https://theins. ru/news/269490 (one of the several articles about this news)

As of March 1, the Western Military District will formally cease to exist and will be divided between the Moscow Military District and the Leningrad Military District. In this post I had elaborated on how the existing formations under the WMD will be divided among these new MDs and which new units and formations are being created within them, according to Ukrainian sources. It’s not clear yet how this will affect the Group of Forces “West” in Ukraine (under which all the formations of the WMD are currently fighting); it’s also possible that there will be no consequence at all, at least in the short to medium term.

It’s moreover reported that the Northern Fleet Joint Strategic Command, which was a pseudo military district led by the Northern (Arctic) Fleet of the Navy, will cease to exist in such form. In fact, the 14th Corps (which will be reformed into a Combined Arms Army) will become part of the Leningrad MD, along with the 11th Corps (Baltic Fleet), which should be reformed in the same way. Other rumors from a few months ago reported that the Coastal Troops of the Russian Navy (which include naval infantry and coastal defense units) will be subordinated to the military districts and no longer to the Navy, which will lose formal jurisdiction over any land-based unit, while retaining it, of course, over ships, submarines, naval aviation and likely air defence forces. Thus the mid-2010s Russian reform that had created army corps under Navy command dies: the 22nd Corps (Black Sea Fleet) was merged last year under the new 18th CAA of the Southern MD and the 68th Corps was already under the Eastern MD.

The four illegally annexed Ukrainian oblasts (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) became formally part of the Southern Military District - after all, the 1st and the 2nd Corps (former D/LPR armies) were already part of the 8th CAA of the SMD. There is still no update about the creation of the Azov Sea Flotilla in Mariupol, which had been rumored.

The official version behind the creation of the Leningrad Military District and the new formations under its control is that it was established as a reaction to NATO’s expansion with Finland and Sweden joining, but in fact it’s a move decided in December 2022 after the partial mobilization and in the context of the expansion of the Russian Armed Forces for the war in Ukraine.