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http://4freerussia.org/putin.war/Putin.War-Eng.pdf
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Chapter 11
HOW MUCH DOES THE WAR WITH UKRAINE COST?
An estimate of the cost of Putin's war campaign on Ukrainian territory requires an approach from two directions. First, it is necessary to calculate how much the direct combat operations cost Russia, operations in which Russian Federation “hybrid” forces are actively taking part (the “vacationers,” the “volunteers” and the like). This is the direct cost of the war, and evidently, it will not be very great in terms of the government's scale. Second, it is important to analyze the indirect cost linked to the introduction of sanctions against Russian banks and companies, as well as the food embargo, asymmetrically introduced in response by Russia, inflation, devaluation, and the economic crisis. And that amount will be much greater.
Direct costs for those who are fighting include expenditures on their ongoing maintenance (food, housing, medical care and so on), and expenses for the ongoing maintenance and repair of armor used in the combat zone, including ammunition.
According to our estimates, the number of participants in combat in the east of Ukraine on the side of the separatists rose from 10,000-15,000 in the early summer of 2014 to 35,000 to 37,000 in the early spring of 2015; meanwhile, the number of Russian Federation military rose from 3,000-5,000 to 8,000-10,000.
Vladimir Yefimov, head of the Fund for Sverdlovsk Veterans of Special Forces, who is involved in sending Russian [Federation] "volunteers" to the Donbass, stated that the cost of maintaining one Russian "volunteer" is 350,000 rubles per month (US $7,039). Multiply 350,000 rubles by 6,000 volunteers for 10 months and we get a figure of 21 billion rubles (US $422 million). Let us suppose that the monthly maintenance of the local "volunteers" costs three to four times less, we get a figure of 25 billion rubles for their maintenance for 10 months. Thus the total is 46 billion rubles ($503 million) for 10 months of the war or 4.6 billion rubles ($92 billion a month) of direct costs for the "volunteers."
Add to this 15% for the cost of use, repair and service of the military armor, and for its transport from Russian Federation warehouses -- another 7 billion rubles. It must also be taken into account that all the ammunition used by the separatists is intended for outdated forms of weapons taken from warehouses and no longer produced in Russia. In the same way, we estimate that all the Russian armor destroyed or damaged in the Donbass will not be restored by repairs or by purchase of the RF Defense Ministry of additional units of military armor.
The direct costs of the RF for the war with Ukraine for 10 months are around 53 million rubles
Thus, we have calculated the direct costs to Russia for the war in the east of Ukraine for 10 months to be 53 billion rubles ($1 billion). On the one hand, that is not so much, if you take into account that the annual expenditures of the Russian federal budget amount to 15 trillion rubles ($302 billion). But, on the other hand, you can compare: the cost of the state program "Development of Culture and Tourism" in 2015 was 95 billion rubles ($1.9 billion); the program "Preservation of Nature" was 30 billion rubles ($604 million); the program "Development of Physical Culture and Sports" was 68 billion ($1.3 billion); the funding of two of the country’s leading universities (Moscow and St. Petersburg) within the framework of the program "Development of Education" was a little more than 20 billion rubles ($402 million) a year.
REFUGES
The destruction of hundreds and thousands of residential buildings, objects of social and transport infrastructure and of industrial plants is a direct consequence of the war in the Donbass. But until combat ends, it is not possible to estimate even approximately the scale of such destruction. By the same token, it is currently impossible to know whether Russia will bear any of the costs connected to this reconstruction. This is a matter for the future.
However, any war is accompanied by the appearance of a large number of refugees -- people who cannot live with the constant risk to their lives and the lives of their children. Before the war, there were about 7 million people living in the Lugansk and Donetsk Regions of Ukraine. Statistics from the official Ukrainian and Russian authorities on the number of refugees are sharply different. According to the UN, about one million people throughout the entire territory of the conflict left by the spring of 2015. Even so, the number of refugees has practically ceased to grow since November of last year. According to the data from UN OCHA, the number of refugees who leave for other regions of Ukraine and to Russia are approximately equal, that is, at the present time we can speak about the presence of approximately a half million Ukrainian refugees in various regions of Russia.
Judging from everything, a unified standard of costs for the maintenance of refugees has been established by the Kremlin for Russian governors: 800 rubles a day ($16) (250 rubles [$5] for food and 550 rubles [$11] for housing). Mitin, the governor of Novgorod Region has stated this, and these same figures are contained in a decree from the government of the Volgograd Region dated July 7th, 2014, No. 325-p . What is more, figures provided at a meeting of the working group of the Public Chamber of the Kirov Region provide the same information. This means that the maintenance of Ukrainian refugees is costing regional budgets about 12 billion rubles a month ($241 million), and since July 2014, this amount has reached about 80 billion rubles ($1.6 billion).
CRIMEA
If the cost of restoring Donbass is still not known, and it is not clear who will finance it, the Russian authorities have already made a decision regarding the annexation of the Crimean peninsula to the Russian Federation: the main costs will be borne by the federal budget through the cutting of expenditures on other line items (above all, allocations for the development of the Russian regions).
On August 11th, 2014, the government of Russia approved a federal targeted program entitled "SocialEconomic Development of the Republic of Crimea and City of Sevastopol through 2020." Its implementation will enable the raising of the living stand of the population and the development of the economy in Crimea up to the average Russian level. The cost of the funding of this program is 681,221,180,000 rubles, of which 658, 135, 800,000 rubles will be allocated from the federal budget.
On March 31st, 2014, President Putin signed a Decree on Raising Pensions of Crimean Pensioners to the Median Russian Level. There are a total of 677,000 pensioners in the Crimea. Before the annexation to Russia, the amount of their pensions (converted) was 5,504 rubles ($110) per month; in mid-2014, the amount of the pensions in Crimean was 10,670 rubles ($215), and in Sevastopol, 11,680 rubles ($235). The funding of the Crimean pensions is made at the expense of Russia's Pension Fund. In 2014, about 60 billion rubles ($1.2 billion) went to cover them, and in 2015 (after the February indexation of pensions), about 100 billion rubles ($2 billion) will be spent from the Pension Fund of Russia.
As a result of the pension reform of 2013, the determination of the amounts of payments to Russian pensioners has been converted to a point system. This means that an individual pension now depends not on those pension contributions that were made by the pensioner during his work life, but rather on the total number of pensioners who will receive pensions. Since the Crimean pensioners made their contributions to the Ukrainian pension system, obviously the payment of their pensions will be made possible by reducing the pensions paid to Russian pensioners.
There are a few expenditures in the government program that must be financed by so-called extrabudgetary sources. However, there are no illusions here: these costs will be compensated out of the pockets of Russian citizens. Thus, for example, Tekhpromeksport, the subsidiary of the Rostech state corporation headed by Sergei Chemezov, a friend of Putin's even since the Soviet era, must finance the construction of heating electrical stations in the Crimea. Of course this will not be done as charity -- all investments in the construction of these stations and the corresponding revenue will be returned by a tariff on energy levied by the government of Russia on consumers in the European part of Russia and in the Urals. These payments total about 20 billion rubles a year ($403 million).
INFLATION
As a result of the Kremlin's foreign policy, Western sanctions were imposed on Russian officials, businessmen and companies supporting the operation in Crimea. It is hard to estimate the damage of such measures as, for example, the ban on the delivery of equipment and parts for military production. But obviously, this will deter the production of domestic plants and will subsequently lower Russians' wages; it will lead to a reduction in the quality and technical level of production, which raises the expenditures for its use and requires large expenditures from the budget.
The personal sanctions against Putin's friends have led to a freezing of their assets. But they have found opportunities to compensate their losses. Some of them have done so with new contracts (for example, Arkady Rotenberg's company received a contract to build the Kerch Strait Bridge valued at more than 240 billion rubles). Some have done so through an administrative division of the market (for example, by decree of St. Petersburg Governor G. Poltavchenko, the accounts of a number of municipal companies will be transferred to the Rossiiya Bank, the main shareholder of which is Yury Kovalchuk, Putin's friend from the Ozero Cooperative. This same bank was handed a contract for the organization of accounts on the wholesale electric power market. By decision of the government, the banks of Putin's friends who were placed under sanctions will receive tens of billions of rubles from the National Welfare Fund, although they do not meet the criteria for selection by banks, approved by the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank (the Bank of Russia).
The financial sanctions had the most severe effect on our economy: the ban on US and EU companies from offering loans, lines of credit, and purchases of shares and bonds to or from Russian banks and organizations controlled by the government. As a result, in order to pay the external debts to Russian creditors, the Central Bank had to raise the demand for foreign currency on the domestic mark in the fall of 2014, which led to both a crash of the ruble rate and a surge in inflation.
In fact, runaway inflation began earlier, when Putin, by a decree on August 6th, 2014, banned the import of agricultural goods, raw materials and food from the EU, US, Australia, Canada and Norway. This provoked a reduction of offer on the market and a rise in prices.
Russia has enormous reserves of productive land, but our agriculture cannot feed our population. In 2013, 70% of fruit and berries on the Russian market were imported; 41% of the beef; 28% of the pork; 23% of the dairy products. As a result of Putin's decision in the third quarter of 2014, the importation of dairy and meat products into the RF fell by 26%, and of fish to 48% as compared to 2013. According to the estimates of the Institute of Strategic Analysis of the Anti-Corruption Fund, due to the rise in prices provoked by the ban, about 147 billion rubles are being taken from Russians' wallets this year—that’s about 1,000 rubles from each resident of our country.
In 2013, consumer inflation in Russia was 6.5%. In the 12 months since the annexation of the Crimea, it has accelerated to 17%, lowering the incomes and savings of Russians by 11.5%. According to the estimates of the Bank of Russia, almost 80% of this acceleration is related to the devaluation of the ruble, and 20% to the ban on the import of food. Understandably, the devaluation of the ruble was influenced not only by the sanctions but also by the fall in the price of oil. The distribution of deposits of these two factors is 1:2, that is, due to the imposition of sanctions, inflation in Russia accelerated by 3%.
Thus, the cost for Russian citizens of the confrontation with Ukraine has been an additional 5.5% rise in prices in the year since the annexation of Crimea. This 5.5% of inflation means that Russians have lost approximately 2 trillion rubles ($40 billion) of their wages and approximately 750 million rubles ($15 million) of their savings.
Edit: Linkki alkuperäiseen lisätty, muotoilua korjattu.
