At the end of October, Crimean collaborators, gathered for an “economic council,” decided to talk about the “steady growth of prosperity” on the occupied peninsula, which, as predicted, turned out to be a highly strained process.
The fake “chair of the state council committee on budget, financial, investment, and tax policy,” Olga Vinogradova, stated that allegedly “in 2026, Crimea’s revenues will reach 231.1 billion rubles,” and that allegedly “in 2014, its own revenues were 11.8 billion rubles, and now they have reached 119 billion rubles,” and therefore, allegedly, “the budget has increased more than tenfold.”
What’s noteworthy here isn’t just that the AR of Crimea’s budgeted revenue for 2014 was actually projected at 5.37 billion hryvnia, or about 21.5 billion rubles at the then exchange rate, nor that the ruble has devalued at least twice as much due to inflation since 2014.
More interesting is that, according to September statements by the fake “finance minister” Irina Kiviko, the occupied AR of Crimea’s revenues allegedly “increased to 130 billion rubles” as early as 2024, and therefore it was claimed that “Crimea could become a subsidy-free region in just 5-7 years.”
Against the backdrop of this “small discrepancy” of tens of billions, the statements of the illegal “chief Crimean tax official,” Roman Nazdrachev, have become characteristic.
That in 2025, his “department” squeezed “an additional 13 billion rubles” from the peninsula’s population and economy, including 10 billion for the republic’s budget.
At the same time, Nozdrachev directly states that they “have reached the limit for collecting additional funds for the republic’s budget,” and that next year, the “optimistic” scenario is to “maintain the achieved level.”
Translated into plain language, this means that the result of these “additional revenues” was the “tax officials” squeezing out the remnants of the Crimean economy, for an artificial and one-time “uplift” of their “own revenues” to the 130 billion mark imposed by the Kremlin.
Moreover, even the “optimists” from the “economic council,” having shifted from “budget trillions” to the “real sector,” produced extremely characteristic, albeit deliberately “strained,” figures, with an “industrial production index” of 99% and an “agricultural production index” of 88.8%, that is, with a decline in volumes in key economic sectors.
And the “driver of the peninsula’s economic growth,” so often lauded by Crimean collaborators, construction, which allegedly “increased” by 35% over the year, has turned out to be a fashionable “paper tiger.”
Over the year, as the collaborators themselves admit, “housing construction volumes decreased by 3.4%, and multi-apartment housing commissioning by a third,” and therefore the “growth” in construction supposedly occurred “thanks to the implementation of road construction projects,” where many trillions could indeed disappear without a trace.
All of this once again refutes the “optimistic announcements” made by the criminal “speaker” Vladimir Konstantinov and “finance minister” Irina Kiviko, that supposedly “Crimea could become a subsidy-free region in just 5-7 years,” since the only “growth drivers” for the occupiers’ “republican budget revenues” remain inflation and the “negative growth” of the ruble.
