Aggressors may establish an uncontrolled and exhausting regime of exploitation of the natural riches, infrastructure facilities, and productive potential of the seized region. Pumping out mineral resources, illegal resource extraction, and using food reserves in the interests of the metropole deprives the Indigenous people of the economic base for independent existence and redirects all the region's wealth toward the enrichment of the colonizer.
Shifting the upkeep of the mobilized onto the subjects themselves: Cossacks dispatched to the imperial construction sites were left without supply and "suffer great want from hunger, having neither food for themselves, nor winter quarters, nor fodder for the horses"[1]. Workers for state construction the tsar simply ordered to be "taken from Ukraine, from those towns that are under your authority"[1], while at the works themselves people perished "from back-breaking labor, hunger and the harsh climate"[2].
The Regular Army of the Russian Empire shifted the cost of the imposed military service onto the Indigenous population itself. Imperial general Yermolov testifies in his "Notes" that the men levied by requisition were sent out "with their own arms and at their own expense"[3].
The "Conditions prescribed to submitting highlanders", issued by general Grabbe, commander of the troops of the Caucasus Line (the chain of imperial fortifications on the land of the Nokhchi), on 15 June 1840, obliged the Chechen auls to hand over the working cattle and transport of their households for the empire's use: at the first demand of the pristav (a superintendent appointed by the empire) to provide arbas (two-wheeled carts) and donkeys. Point 4 prescribed: "At the pristav's demand to provide arbas or donkeys for hauling loads"[4].
The Terek Cossack Host of the Russian Empire leased out the seized Chechen lands to oil companies and lived on rent from another people's subsoil: in 1899 about 21.9 million of the 26.22 million puds of total output were extracted on the host's lands, and in that year alone the companies paid the host 631.8 thousand rubles[5]. Historians Ya. Z. Akhmadov and E. Kh. Khasmagomadov write: the largest owner of the oil-bearing plots turned out to be the host itself; it did no extraction of its own, and the usual terms of a lease were 150 rubles a year per desiatina (a desiatina is a little over a hectare) plus "from 2 to 6 kopecks for every pud of oil extracted"[5]. Historian Z. Kh. Ibragimova records the dynamic: the host's capital grew from 400 thousand rubles in 1877 to 3 million in 1900 - "This was the result of receiving income from the oil-bearing lands"[6]. The scale was set by the field itself: on 27 August 1895 well No. 7 of Akhverdov's company gave "a gusher of incredible force, yielding up to 1 million puds a day... The roar and the smell of oil could be sensed 15 versts from the field"[7].
The Ukrainian regions became the empire's main raw-materials donor: "In 1910 coal extraction amounted to 1 billion poods, and in 1913 – 1.5 billion poods. Over this time the Donbas's share in the empire's coal industry grew from 67% to 74%… Before World War I, Ukrainian metallurgy produced 2/3 of the pig iron smelted in the empire"[8].