Muscovites are starting to be offered big money, but those who show interest in it have to reckon with the fact that they could pay the highest tax for the high premium. Own life. They would almost certainly be taken to the front. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin signed a “decree on additional social support measures for persons” who join the Russian army.
Photo: SITA/AP, Dmitri Lovetsky
A large-scale poster in Moscow promoting voluntary entry into the Russian army.
The document, which Moscow published on its website, does not mention the involvement of volunteers in Russia’s war against Ukraine. However, it is clear that those tempted by the offer would clearly have to join the fray.
The decree guarantees that everyone who signs a contract with the army will receive a one-time financial contribution of 1.9 million rubles. Converted to 20,000 euros. By Russian standards, this is a lot of money, considering that the average monthly salary is around 900 euros. The decision to grant the bonus, signed by Sobyanin, means that the average Russian earner would receive a one-time bonus amounting to almost two of his annual salaries. Of course, higher incomes in the capital must be taken into account: for example, employees in Vladivostok cannot compare with much better-paid working Muscovites.
A bonus of 1.9 million rubles can only be obtained by applicants with a permanent residence in Moscow. And then how much will they earn when they put on the military uniform? The condition is to sign a contract with the army for one year; the volunteer (if he remains alive) earns 5.2 million rubles during that time, which is converted to 56,000 euros. Together with the bonus, he would have improved by 7.1 million rubles (76,000 euros) in twelve months of military service.
Moscow is not the first to offer a financial bonus to men who are willing to risk their lives for money. Something similar has already been introduced in many regions of Russia. For example, in the Krasnodar region, Tatarstan and Dagestan. However, the one-time rewards there are incomparable to the sum offered by the mayor of the Russian metropolis: in Dagestan it is only 500,000 rubles (a little more than 5,340 euros), in Tatarstan and the Krasnodar region they promise twice as much, while the city of Krasnodar gives another 250 thousand rubles from the city hall budget.
Do they offer anywhere else more than in Moscow? No, but one part of the Russian Federation is getting close to it: “In the Karachay-Cherkessia Republic, they started paying out 1.5 million rubles from June of this year,” the Moscow Times server pointed out. Converted to 16,000 euros. However, it should be pointed out that that the local treasury can handle a higher number of volunteers (controversies will still be mentioned in this text), because the Republic of Karachay has only 116 thousand inhabitants, on the contrary, there are 12.6 million people living in metropolitan Moscow.
Novaya Gazeta’s server noted that it looks as if individual regions are running a competition to see which of them offers more: “Several regions have increased the reward several times since the beginning of this year.” This trend has been going on for a long time. For example, last year, when in Krasnodar regions started offering a one-time bonus, setting it at 100,000 rubles (1,070 euros), but currently it is up to ten times more money.
The mentioned 1.5 million rubles in the small Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia will not really empty the local coffers, but on the other hand, you have to look at where the money will come from for the men who voluntarily join the army. The leadership of the republic is obviously doing this at the cost of its indebtedness. “In May of this year, regional budget expenditures increased by 5 percent compared to the planned,” Novaja gazeta pointed out.
It sounds paradoxical that they allocated money for future mercenaries there, despite the fact that the Karachay-Cherkessia Republic is among the ten poorest regions of the Russian Federation in terms of per capita spending. The average per capita income there is statistically even worse: this republic ranks second to last in all of Russia.
Increasing the bonus for joining the army is apparently related to the fact that its commanders have a problem with recruitment. How, for example, can a man living in the Karachay-Cherkessia Republic view the premium? If he enlists knowing that he may fall at the front, he has a vision of one-time money that he would earn in this republic in four years.
And what would death mean for Russian soldiers? The state pays 3 million rubles (32,000 euros) to the families of the survivors. And what are the losses of the Russian army? The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces states that the aggressor has already lost more than 545,000 men (this number includes not only the killed but also the wounded). As for the dead, in February of this year Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared that more than 180,000 Russians had already died since February 2022. Four months ago, the British station BBC estimated the number of Russian soldiers killed at 50,000, which is significantly less than what Zelensky said.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
