Russia Turns to Tax Hikes, Other Measures to Fund Its War

Fighting a long war of aggression is expensive! Hopefully, it will soon become too expensive!

When will the Russian Slav(e)s finally get rid of the megalomaniac and war criminal Putin the Terrible! Humanity is waiting anxiously for this to happen!

"... With Russia’s war against Ukraine now in its third year, a question asked with increasing frequency is where Moscow is getting the money to keep its economy afloat. Raw material exports are declining; foreign borrowing is insignificant; and nearly half of the country’s gold and foreign exchange reserves have been frozen for over two years. Despite all this, the Russian economy is growing rapidly, as are the incomes of many Russians, and the government has announced an increase in military spending this year of 70 percent on national defense alone compared with 2023 to almost 11 trillion rubles ($122 billion). ...

Last year, the authorities employed a series of one-off measures to fill the treasury’s coffers. Among them was a windfall tax on companies making a profit of over 1 billion rubles that came into effect on January 1, 2024, and raised 319 billion rubles (more than $3.5 billion).

The authorities also introduced a temporary exchange rate duty on exports from October 1, 2023, until the end of this year. In the fourth quarter of last year alone, that measure injected an additional 140 billion rubles (about $1.5 billion) into the state budget.

Finally, the Russian budget also now gets a slice of the pie whenever Western companies leave the Russian market. ...

At the beginning of the year, President Vladimir Putin announced tax increases, which officials euphemistically refer to as a “fine-tuning” of the tax system. The concrete details of this “fine-tuning” were unveiled immediately after his inauguration in May. The changes will affect two direct taxes that showed the biggest growth rates in 2023: income tax, which grew 14 percent, and profit tax, which grew 25 percent. In the last five years, the total sum raised via these two taxes averaged 7–8 percent of GDP. ..." 

Russia Turns to Tax Hikes, Other Measures to Fund Its War - Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center