21 Million Poor

From the MT:

“21M Russians Live in Poverty, Official Data Says”

The number of Russians living below the poverty line has grown by half a million since early 2018, according to official data. Western sanctions and falling oil prices over the past five years have led to a decline in real incomes and a rise in consumer prices. President Vladimir Putin is pursuing a national program on drastically reducing poverty by the time his term ends in 2024, aiming for 12% poverty rates this year. Russia’s poverty rates totaled 14.3%, or 20.9 million people, in January-March 2019, according to Russia’s State Statistics Service (Rosstat). That’s up from 13.9%, or 20.4 million people, in January-March 2018. “If the subsistence minimum grew commensurately with inflation, the share of the population with incomes below the subsistence minimum would remain unchanged,” Rosstat said.  Authorities set the minimum subsistence level for January-March at 10,753 rubles ($169), up from 10,038 rubles ($158) the previous year. “When inflationary pressure increases, it’s the poor who suffer in the first place,” Alfa Bank chief economist Natalya Orlova told RBC. In total, 18.4 million Russians, or 12.6% of the population, lived below the poverty line in 2018, Rosstat said.

^ You can only help but feel sorry for the 20 million ordinary Russians that are struggling to survive and the millions more that are close to the poverty line. Those millions upon millions of innocent men, women and children could be helped if Putin and the Russian Government put the resources they are currently using to fight in Syria (to keep their dictator-ally in power), the Donbas and other places around the world into helping those within Russia. Russian history has shown that those in power that put more into world politics than the Russian people don’t end well. Czarist Russia ended when more value was placed on World War 1 than giving the people bread. Soviet Russia ended when more value was placed on the Cold War than giving the people a good basic standard of living. Now in Putin’s Russia he has placed more value on his own aspirations of world domination (through the various wars he has started and is currently fighting in) and would rather see ordinary Russians suffer and die living below the poverty line than doing something about feeding them. History is known to eventually repeat itself. ^

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/07/30/21m-russians-live-in-poverty-official-data-says-a66618