Millions of people in Russia have been forced below the poverty line as a result of the country’s economic predicament.
Nearly 20 million Russians are trying to survive on less than 9,452 roubles (€125) a month, the minimum subsistence level set by the Russian government.
This figure represents a 20% increase year-on-year, with an average 16 million people living below the poverty threshold in 2014.
But the 13% who are on the poverty threshold is still lower than the 29% who were there in 2000 when Vladimir Putin first came to power.
The country’s economy has been increasingly hard pressed both by Western sanctions to protest the annexation of Crimea and the drop in oil prices. Russia is heavily dependent on its oil exports and the immediate future is not shaping up well in this regard.
In his first decade in power, Putin owed a good deal of his popularity to high oil prices which served to help increase the incomes of ordinary Russian citizens.
But recent opinion polls indicate that trust in Putin fell to 73% during March against a rating of 87% last August, according to the Levada Centre, an independent pollster based in Moscow.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in January that increasing poverty was “one of the most painful” consequences of the economic crisis.
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