Russia’s budget deficit has surpassed the government’s entire 2023 target in the first four months of the year as wartime spending and falling energy revenues continued to cut into the state budget.
The federal budget deficit rose to 3.42 trillion rubles ($45 billion) in January-April 2023, according to the Finance Ministry figures published Wednesday.
Revenues fell 22% to 7.8 trillion rubles, while spending rose 26% to 11.2 trillion rubles compared to the same time last year.
Russia had forecast its budget deficit to reach 2.9 trillion rubles ($43 billion) in 2023. At least one-third of state spending was expected to go to defense and security.
The Finance Ministry stopped publishing monthly budget figures last year, but Reuters calculated April’s budget deficit at around 1 trillion rubles ($13 billion).
January-April figures also showed Russia’s oil and gas revenues dropping 52% to 2.3 trillion rubles ($30 billion). Non-oil and gas revenues increased by 5% to 5.5 trillion rubles ($72 billion).
Last year, Russia’s total budget deficit amounted to 3.3 trillion rubles ($47 billion) — or 2.3% of its GDP — making it the second-largest deficit in modern Russian history.
Total government spending in 2022 amounted to 31.11 trillion rubles, exceeding the pre-war forecast by over a third and the amount spent in 2021 by over a quarter.
Last year’s gap was surpassed only by that recorded in 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Good news. Now it’s time to tighten the noose even further. Putler is destroying the russian economy far better than the West could have hoped for.
Unfortunately the chicoms are propping putler up. Extract from an article by Allister Heath in today’s DT:-
“There is only one winner from Vladimir Putin’s monstrous war on Ukraine, and that is the Chinese Communist Party. To our eternal shame, Xi Jinping has spectacularly outwitted the West, drastically expanded his global influence, and turned Russia into a Chinese protectorate in all but name.
Russia was meant to have collapsed by now. Britain, America and Europe’s gambit was that drastic trade, financial and technological sanctions, a cap on the price of Russian seaborne oil, and substantial help to Ukraine would be enough to defeat Moscow. It hasn’t worked. For all of the sacrifices of the Ukrainian people, the war has reached a stalemate, at least until Kyiv’s counter-offensive.
The reason? China has quietly stepped in, bailing out Putin’s shattered economy on a transformational scale, swapping energy and raw materials for goods and technology. The sanctions are a joke. Russian-Chinese trade rose 41.3 per cent in the first four months of the year to $73 billion, financing Putin’s war. China’s exports to Russia were up 153 per cent in April 2023 alone; their rise more than cancels out the decline in German and French trade, as Robin Brooks, of the Institute for International Finance, points out. China’s trade has also shot up with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia and Turkey, all with easy, porous access to Russia.
No wonder Russian society hasn’t imploded. There may no longer be any McDonald’s in Moscow, but sales of Chinese cars are buoyant. We were told Russia couldn’t survive without Western technology, but it is switching instead to China’s rival systems.”
The GDP of Russia is getting even smaller than the GDP of bert