Russian airlines have begun canceling flights to Siberia as authorities cut subsidies for domestic passenger flights. According to Izvestia, citing a source, funding was cut from 9 billion to about 7.5 billion rubles. Another source of the publication claims that up to 7.6 billion.
According to Izvestia's interlocutors, the reduction in subsidies is due to the sequestration of state budget expenditures. In this case, all expenditure items of the budget are reduced by a certain percentage. The Ministry of Transport was forced to cut costs by 5%, as a result of which the regional flight program had to be reduced by 17%. Flights in Russia are financed from two sources: federal and regional budgets. Under the reduction, according to Izvestia's sources, were those flights on the co-financing of which the airlines have not yet agreed with the regional authorities. Most of the canceled flights were in the Tyumen and Omsk regions, Dagestan, North Ossetia, Tatarstan and St. Petersburg.
Thus, flights from Nizhny Novgorod to Petrozavodsk and Kemerovo to Chita were canceled at Nordwind. The Rossiya airline, which is part of the Aeroflot group, canceled flights from St. Petersburg to Tobolsk.