This sum of 195,000 rubles per month, at the current rate of the ruble, is about €3,200 per month. In Russia, it’s a very big salary: it’s four times the median salary. That’s five to six times what a worker in the company that makes Ladas, for example, earns.
This is all the more important since many mobilized come from the most remote and poorest regions of Russia, in Siberia, in the Far East… Regions where many families are in a subsistence economy. Moreover, in some of these regions, as in Yakutia, the local authorities also offer baskets of vegetables to the families of those mobilized.
By announcing this level of guaranteed salary, Vladimir Putin banged his fist on the table. Because for several days there have been testimonies of mobilized people who complain of not being paid, or very little. In Bashkiria, for example, a region close to Kazakhstan, families say that they have received only 1,800 rubles, or 30 euros, since the departure of the fathers of families a month ago. Same thing in the region of Tyumen, in Siberia. Discontent is mounting and the Russian authorities know that they must react. Hence the development of Vladimir Putin. We will see if it is followed up.
Earlier in the week, Vladimir Putin made another announcement that civil servants who will go to work in the annexed Ukrainian territories will receive double pay and a daily travel bonus. Because it is one thing to decree that these territories become Russian, but they must also be administered. However, many Ukrainian civil servants have left. They must therefore be replaced.
We don’t know if we’re rushing to get there, but these financial benefits granted may be a clue. You should know that the heads of the occupation administrations are sometimes targeted by attacks probably committed by the Ukrainian services in these annexed territories.