We’ve already written about the tragicomic squabbles between Crimean collaborators over every million “budget rubles” in the realm of propaganda and “external events,” against the backdrop of even the declared “republican budget deficit” for next year already reaching 4 billion.
At the same time, the Crimean “authorities” have been blaring about “increasing revenues to the republican budget,” clearly trying to conform to the current Kremlin financial doctrine of “guns instead of butter.”
However, the aggressor’s own fiscal officials had already confirmed by October that by 2025 they had squeezed more than the maximum out of the remnants of the Crimean “economy,” and such a stunt will not be repeated.
And now the fake “finance minister” Irina Kiviko has decided to “pass off necessity as virtue” and emphasize that the “republican budget” for 2026 is supposedly good because it “reflects the economic realities” of the current “negative economic growth.”
Moreover, the “minister” even publicly acknowledged the expected “decrease in growth rates for a number of indicators, particularly for enterprise revenues and profits.”
This, translated from the aggressor’s ‘Newspeak’, means that industry and trade on the peninsula have finally “slunk down,” and this “budget spring” will eventually dry up.
Therefore, the collaborators hope to raise the “level of tax and non-tax revenues to the republican budget” to “this year’s level” by increasing the “personal income tax rate.”
This means that Crimean residents will simply have to eat less in 2026 to “balance the budget.” Moreover, this “product substitution” will be significant: the occupiers admit that with the overall expenditure level of the “republican budget” at 235-254 billion for the next three years and the “federal crutch” at 111 billion for 2026, this amount will be significantly reduced in the future additionally, by 15-20 billion each year.
We previously wrote that the Kremlin cut “annual subsidies” for the “republican budget” by 100 billion in 2024, but those were “software funds” used for various projects and primarily feeding the corruption pyramid; now Moscow plans to significantly cut “survival budgets” for collaborators—that is, current real expenses.
Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that the “chief budget official” of the occupation “power vertical,” Vladimir Konstantinov, who was already talking about “achieving budget self-sufficiency” and “steady growth in republican revenues” this summer, has now focused his public rants on “exposing Kyiv corruption,” as well as threats to turn Berlin “into nuclear dust” as part of a “real military conflict between Germany and Russia.”
However, neither the “Kyiv corrupt officials” nor the “German warmongers” will clearly help the old swindler from “Consol” fill the multi-billion-dollar hole in the collapsing “republican finances” against the backdrop of the comatose state of Crimean industry and the collapse of the region’s agriculture.
