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As a result, on New Year's Eve, the Ministry of Finance and the Federal Tax Service offered businesses to pay additional corporate tax for 2022 from a positive exchange rate difference. The RSPP estimates that this would result in an additional RUB1.8 trillion in corporate tax for the entire economy, of which almost RUB270bn would go to the federal budget. That is not enough.
The government is hoping to resolve the dispute with the RSPP through negotiations and has been holding closed meetings with business representatives. The RSPP is trying to fend off new claims and is arguing that it already expects additional payments from business following last year's dispute over exchange rate differences.
Gazprom could be hit with more special taxes in a throw back to the Yeltsin- era when the Kremlin regularly hit up the gas giant for cash when the government was running out of money. However, the warm winter and full EU storage tanks has already seen gas prices fall to pre-war levels and Gazprom is unlikely to earn the same sort of profits this year. Indeed, there is widespread speculation that Gazprom will cut its supplies to Europe via Ukraine entirely this year as part of its energy war on the West.
2.5 Putin’s Apocalypto
Embracing glory and salvation in death is a recurring theme in Russia’s official rhetoric. Last November, when the Kremlin carefully choregraphed a meeting between the president and a handpicked group of soldiers’ mothers, Vladimir Putin also tried to put a positive spin on dying for the Motherland, Meduza reports.
“We’re all mortals, we’re all under the Lord, and we’ll all leave this world someday,” he told the women. “The question is how we lived. [...] Some people pass away because of vodka or something else. And then they’re gone and it’s hard to know if they ever lived at all. But your son lived. And his goal was achieved. That means he didn’t depart this life in vain.”
On January 6, 2023, Simonyan appeared in a video where she also addressed “goals” in the invasion of Ukraine, criticizing Russians for demanding clarity from the Kremlin about the war’s objectives. Goals change in every armed conflict, she said, explaining that the Soviet Union sought first to expel the Nazi invaders before deciding to march to Berlin. In Ukraine, she claims, Russia’s “minimum goal” is to “liberate” the four regions of western Ukraine it annexed last year, while unspecified possibilities could allow Moscow to pursue regime change in Kyiv (“demilitarization and de-Nazification”).
Embracing death or indeed the apocalypse has been an important element of the Kremlin’s messaging since at least 2018, when Putin acknowledged in an interview with Vladimir Solovyov that a retaliatory nuclear strike by Moscow would mean a global catastrophe but added that he sees no point in protecting a world that contains no Russia. Months later, asked if he had adopted some form of monarchic nihilism, Putin suddenly spoke in religious terms, declaring that Russians would “would go to paradise” as “martyrs” while its attackers would “simply perish” without time to repent their sins.
19 RUSSIA Country Report March 2023 www.intellinews.com