Even though the wave of territorial reforms that swept through Russia in 2003–2008 is over, the relevance of this problem in our days has not disappeared. It would seem that in the last ten years, since the last reform, nothing interesting has happened in the sphere of administrative-territorial division, an opinion was created that the consolidation of the regions once and for all solved the issue of optimization of the subjects of the Federation and, thus, stabilized the net of administrative-territorial units for a long time. However, in fact, many problems have not been solved. Instead, there was only their "freeze", postponing their permission indefinitely. Based on the above-mentioned fact, it is safe to say that someday the unsolved problems will surface, and then the authorities will be forced to return to the reform in the regions, but it will happen likely in complicated conditions. The purpose of this work is to identify trends and directions of development of modern Russian administrative-territorial division (including in the relatively distant future in terms of a forecast), arguing pros and cons and giving proposals of changing them. In the author's opinion the scientific novelty of the research consists of the development of the system of Russian administrative-territorial division in the future. In addition, the author proposes his own version of the draft of its reform, based primarily on the principle of expediency of the separation of certain regions in the Soviet period, which have since retained the configuration of the territorial structure. The importance for the applied activity is to identify the imperfections of the administrative-territorial division, the consideration of which will make it possible to develop a more competent regional reform.