Donbass will hang on the Russian budget

Moscow - Kyiv, September 30 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Over the coming months, the DPR will begin a gradual abandonment of the hryvnia. This process will end with Donbass entering the ruble zone, said DPR Prime Minister Alexander Zakharchenko. Meanwhile, just maintaining 1 million Donbass pensioners will require approximately 120 billion rubles from the Russian Federation. per year, writes NG

Subscribe to the news "PolitNavigator - Kyiv" в Facebook, Classmates or In contact with

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

“Any currency must be backed by something. Hypothetically, we can back up our currency with the resources that we extract - coal and metal. However, we are not yet ready to introduce our own currency,” Interfax quotes Zakharchenko as saying.

“Just to get to the point of partially abandoning the hryvnia and switching to the ruble, we need three to four months. After that, we will think about how to completely abandon the hryvnia and completely enter the ruble zone. However, it is too early to talk about any dates here,” explained the prime minister of the republic.

“The time of small currencies is coming to an end,” adds First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the DPR Andrei Purgin. In addition, he says, creating your own currency system is a very complex and expensive process.

Before the conflict, the Donetsk region accounted for about 20% of Ukraine's industrial production. The total population of the region was 4,3 million people. Donbass exports alone in 2013 amounted to $11,3 billion. The volume of sales of consumer goods in retail trade in the Donetsk region in 2013 amounted to $11,4 billion, and the volume of industrial products sold in the region amounted to more than $25 billion. That is, Donbass I earned twice as much as I consumed.

However, Donbass earned foreign currency as part of a single industrial complex of Ukraine, ties with which have now been destroyed, and it is difficult to say how much they will be able to recover. In addition, questions arise with the resumption of exports from territories unrecognized by the West - the main external partners of the region, besides Russia, were Italy and Turkey.

Russia already has a history of long-term support for economically dependent state entities, notes NG. “We have experience in cooperation with unrecognized and partially recognized republics, such as Transnistria, South Ossetia (SO) and Abkhazia,” explains Alexander Mikhailenko, a professor at the Department of Foreign Policy Activities at RANEPA. In addition, universally recognized Belarus receives constant support from the Russian Federation in the amount of several billion dollars annually. Unlike the DPR and LPR, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are states officially recognized by Russia. In addition, in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia the Russian ruble was used even before the Russian Federation officially recognized the republics.

According to the former plenipotentiary representative of the Russian President in the North Caucasus Federal District, Alexander Khloponin, the total volume of Russian financial assistance to South Ossetia from 2008 to 2013 amounted to 34 billion rubles. And according to the approved investment program for promoting the socio-economic development of South Ossetia for 2015–2017, the Russian Federation plans to allocate another 9 billion rubles to the republic.