Page 70 - RusRPTDec22

expenses, from mobilization and increased social support to business subsidies and to the occupied regions of Ukraine.
The Telegram channel “A Day in Vladimir” drew attention to a job posting in which regional authorities were looking for a paediatric ophthalmologist to be stationed in the Donbas with a salary of RUB450,000 rubles ($7,419) (almost ten times the average salary in health care), even though the Vladimir Region itself has a shortage of doctors (a phenomenon that was exacerbated in many regions during the COVID-19 pandemic). This posting highlights both the high risks that employees associated with the Russian state face in the occupied regions of Ukraine and the need for regional authorities to performatively prioritize these territories, often in order to improve their standing in Moscow.
In Tatarstan, Almir Mikheev, a local deputy from the Fair Russia party, asked the regional government to publish a report on the costs incurred by the republic’s budget due to the war, likely with a similar agenda.
The federal government has so far spoken about additional help to regions with at least a “medium degree of readiness,” such as the Krasnodar Territory, whose government likened the costs incurred due to the war to the cost of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic.
The state news agency RIA recently published data on how the debt of regions has changed in the first nine months of 2022. The overall increase was 8.9%.
It appears that indebtedness grew in almost all regions, with Udmurtia, Mordovia, and Kalmykia facing the largest debt burden, but with the Samara, Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Novgorod Regions—relying on industries that suffered heavily from sanctions—registering the largest increase.
The figures also reveal that the share of budgetary loans in regional debt has grown to 70%. This is a conscious policy that the government has conducted for years in order to replace riskier and higher-cost loans from the market, even as it failed to increase the fiscal autonomy of regions. Borrowing and fiscal rules for regions will be loosened somewhat in 2023 due to the war and the economic crisis, but the federal government will continue to be the main actor to fix fiscal imbalances.
Russian regional budgets are in trouble as sources of revenue dry up. They finance vital state functions. About 90 percent of them are spent on five broad areas. “National economy” includes investments.
Their three main sources of income are personal income tax, profit tax and (in most, but not all regions) various transfers from the federal budget. The two income taxes make up roughly 65-70 percent of “own revenues” (revenues
70 RUSSIA Country Report December 2022 www.intellinews.com