An important role in improving the welfare of depressed areas belongs to the effectiveness of regional policy, which plays an important role in mobilizing internal resources and creating socio-economic conditions for the realization of economic potential. The government is implementing a number of measures to support problem regions. These include: state programs for the socio-economic development of geopolitically important regions, support for rural areas, measures to diversify and restructure the economy of single-industry cities, preferential conditions for areas of advanced socio-economic development and regional programs to ensure the development of municipalities. Often these measures overlap, and funds are transferred to solve the same problem, since there is practically no mechanism for their coordination. In addition, a significant problem that hinders the implementation of state support for depressed regions is the lack of an official legislatively fixed status of a depressed territory. In Russian regional policy, three practices of “development” of depressed territories are most common: the annexation of such territories to a more favorable neighboring territory; providing a constant stream of financial assistance, subsidies and transfers; reduction of social spending in depressed areas through reorganization in the field of local government, education, and medicine. This confirms the inefficiency and inconsistency of financial assistance measures in the context of solving the problems of depressed regions. Thus, we have revealed the absence of unified principles for determining problematic and depressive territories; the existing state measures to support territories partially overlap, which causes an overabundance of financial investments and limits the effectiveness of regional policy.