Abstract: Regional development in many countries has been shown to be interlinked with and dependent upon the development of human capital in regions. Today, human capital gets digitalized, and digital competencies are seen as a crucial component of human capital. However, among them, competencies on modern media use and communication receive much less attention than digital competencies needed for professions or document processing.

Most strategies of the Russian regions calculated till 2030 focus much upon regional human capital. However, in them, human capital is predominantly interpreted in terms of demographics, education, or culture, not communicative capabilities. Moreover, there is a lack of understanding whether competencies linked to communication, Internet use, and media literacy remain overlooked in the regional strategic planning, gradually take their proper place in regional strategic planning, or are seen as digital threats, rather than digital opportunities. In order to address these gaps notable both in academic research and regional strategic planning, we conduct qualitative coding for eight selected full texts of the Russian regional development strategies renewed in 2023. Our results show that the strategies are inert enough in how they, in general, (do not) link human capital to digital media and communication skills. This path dependence creates an obstacle for setting media education as a strategic regional goal for next decades. The strategies non-systemically mention digital competencies as ‘intermediary’ capital, but next-to-never assess the current state of media/communicative competencies and do not set exact and measurable priorities in this area of human capital. We discover ‘four detachments’ of media/communication from regional development, which future indicators for evaluation of communicative human capital may tackle.