Objective: The importance of assessing the socio-economic impacts of climate policies is growing as regulations are being adopted to promote decarbonization processes. Since Russia has committed to carbon neutrality by 2060, a large and diverse policy package should be launched to attain this goal. The policies need to be based on the effectiveness, equality and motivation. This paper presents the results of the first-of-a-kind research aimed to assess the impact of individual decarbonization policies on the distribution of consumer incomes and expenses for Russia. Methods: A system of simulation models was used to estimate prospective greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions pathway for Development Driven by Decarbonization and Democratization (4D scenario) and related macroeconomic effects (evolution of prices, incomes, employment and energy expenditures across major economic sectors and industries), which were used as inputs to the simulation model distributional effect of national decarbonization (DEFEND), which was specially developed to estimate the effects of climate policies at the household level split by income deciles. Results: This paper shows that only low carbon transition will sustain Russian economic growth by promoting reduced concentration of wealth and less centralized political system, whereas maintaining the extraction-based administratively ruled economic model will cause GDP to decline and form a “shagreen skin” economy. Conclusion: The paper concludes that many of the explored policies have regressive distributional effects, but sophisticated socio-economic engineering can tailor neutral climate mitigation policies to help to at least maintain the balance of income and expenses compared to the basic trajectory. This study identifies data and knowledge gaps in calibrating the models that look into the distributional effects.