Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev will lay off 10 percent of the country's civil servants and state-employed officials as of the start of 2016, according to a decree signed on Monday afternoon.
In his annual press conference earlier this month Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia had endured the worst of the financial crisis, which gripped the country last year, but then admitted that Moscow had been too "optimistic" with their growth projections on oil prices. A slump in the price of oil, and the embargo on Western food products, which Russia placed on the West as a response to E.U. and U.S. sanctions has triggered a recession in the country.
According to Medvedev, the Russian state is now looking to streamline and set up a more "compact apparatus" but insisted that this would still be the case even if the economic crisis were not gripping the country.
"We've been talking about this for a while, even outside the context of the advent of the crisis," Medvedev said at a ministerial meeting on signing the decree.
According to the decree, the job cuts will be spread across the spectrum of those on the state's payroll and impact federal ministries, national services and agencies and regional governments.
Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, in March, said that the government was preparing to introduce cuts for federal employees, after Medvedev proposed in 2014 that cuts at the federal and regional level had to be introduced soon.
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I am a Staff Writer for Newsweek's international desk. I report on current events in Russia, the former Soviet Union ... Read more
