“There is no money, but you hold on”: the Russian Federation has sharply reduced funding for the Zaporozhye region’s healthcare system – residents are not paid social assistance

This is reported by Center for Investigative Journalism with reference to open and own sources.

For the second month now, the Zaporizhzhya region has had problems with financing from the occupation budget.

“I receive a monthly allowance for caring for a disabled person. But they didn’t pay it for September. At the post office, the girls said that the funding had not arrived,” reports a resident of the temporarily occupied Pologovsky district.

In the chats of Berdyansk, the main question that worries residents is when the “children’s” payments will arrive.

“Girls, please tell me what’s wrong with child benefits? What’s happening? Maybe someone knows?” – there are dozens of such messages.

The occupiers themselves acknowledge problems with financing.

Zaporozhye collaborator Vladimir Rogov, who now introduces himself as “a neighbor of the Coordination Council of the RF OP for the integration of new regions,” said that he has received complaints from kindergarten workers about “systemic problems with paying for food products supplied to kindergartens.”

“This has led to the fact that children in kindergartens have nothing to eat, while at the same time, kindergarten employees who are ready to feed children at their own expense cannot do this because they themselves have not received a salary,” Rogov writes in his telegram channel.

The delay in salaries for public sector employees in the Zaporozhye region, as Rogov said during a broadcast with the Russian propagandist Solovyov, is allegedly due to the fact that the leadership in the occupation Ministry of Finance is changing.

Probably, funding delays are related to the general budget deficit of the Russian Federation, the lion’s share of which goes to finance the war. After all, in the first six months Russia spent on defense 5.59 trillion rubles, or 12% more than was provided for the entire 2023. And also with a logical reduction in generous funding for “new territories”, which will become less and less the more time passes from the moment of occupation.