Recently, the illegitimate “Crimean speaker” Vladimir Konstantinov decided to “cheer up” the population with another dose of “financial optimism,” announcing that in 2026, the total “revenue of the republic’s budget” would amount to approximately 241.5 billion rubles, while expenditures would be around 245.4 billion, meaning the “deficit” would be “only” about 4 billion.
Against this backdrop, the aggressor’s government announced allocations to the collaborators: 3.7 billion in July “to support the Crimean tourism industry,” 2.2 billion in August “for partial compensation of labor costs,” and another 3 billion in September ostensibly for “socially significant expenses.”
The point is not where these 10 billion rubles will actually vanish, but rather that the very fact of their allocation indicates a much wider “budgetary hole” in Crimea.
Formally, Konstantinov pegged the level of “subsidies for the republic’s budget” at 118 billion, nearly half of the projected “revenues.”
It is worth noting that for 2025, the occupiers announced a total “republican budget” figure exceeding 262 billion, of which 136 billion consisted of “federal subsidies”, a higher amount than projected for 2026, even when including the aforementioned “unplanned subsidies.” Meanwhile, “republican revenues” were projected at 126.4 billion, which is 3 billion higher than the figure for the current year.
At the same time, in 2024, the occupiers claimed to have “achieved growth in own-source revenues” reaching 130 billion; thus, this figure in Crimea has been systematically declining over the past two years.
We previously reported that, in an effort to mask this situation last year, the aggressor’s tax authorities launched an unprecedented “tax compliance” campaign, squeezing an additional 17 billion in “tax” revenue out of Crimeans, yet this clearly failed to stabilize the overall situation.
This year, despite sweeping hikes in “taxes and fees” implemented in January, the occupiers promise to increase that figure by no more than a billion; however, even that goal is, to put it mildly, unrealistic under current conditions.
Meanwhile, Crimean collaborators claimed last year that “budget revenues” from the “resort sector” totaled between 5 and 7 billion; even if that figure was inflated, it demonstrates that tourism played no significant role in the “republican economy.”
Now, however, the sector is generating the aforementioned multi-billion deficit for the occupiers, a fact further confirmed by the cited “force majeure subsidies.”
Against this backdrop, Konstantinov is left to tout the “whopping” 621 million the occupiers garnered from the “sale of nationalized property” in 2026; given the trends described above, the proceeds from this corporate raiding will have no appreciable impact on the rapidly shrinking pool of “republican revenues.”
