Russia cancels New Year’s celebrations to fund its fledgling army in Ukraine

Several Russian cities have announced that they’ve canceled their New Year’s celebrations this year in order to use the money to help the Kremlin fund frontline soldiers and their families. 

Dimitry Denisov, the mayor of Kaluga, stated that he canceled his city’s celebrations to ensure Russian soldiers fighting on the front against Ukraine are “adequately equipped.”

“We will direct all these freed-up funds to support mobilized Kaluga residents,” Denisov shared on social media.

“Our men must be adequately equipped,” Denisov added, “better than the standard provision demands.”

Similar measures have been adopted by regional leaders in Tomsk as well as St. Petersburg, Yakutia, Yaroslval, and Nizhny Novgorod. 

Vladimir Mazur, governor of Tomsk, noted in his address to the people of his region that the money being diverted from New Year’s celebrations from Tomsk will also be used to help the families of those mobilized by the Kremlin. 

“Children cannot be left without holidays and gifts,” Mazur said, “but for officials, there should be no New Year corporate parties.”

In Moscow, Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has said that Russia’s capital would still celebrate the New Year but would tone down the celebration. 

Moscow will forego its traditional fireworks display and mass concerts in Red Square and opt instead to host a smaller set of events and celebrations to help divert some of its New Year’s budgets to the troops serving on the front lines. 

The change in policy could be related to criticism officals faced back in September when officials within the Kremlin and Moscow held a lavish fireworks display celebrating the city’s 875th anniversary on the same day Ukrainian troops achieved their major breakthrough in the Kharkiv Oblast. 

The Russian Defence Ministry called the withdrawal of troops from the area an intentional to regroup “in order to achieve the stated goals of the special military operation to liberate the Donbas.” But the optics of the two events was the beginning of serious and sustained pushback against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

The war in Ukraine has become increasingly unpopular with Russian citizens since the celebration in Moscow and the capitulation of Putin’s troops in the Kharkiv Oblast, and the onset of winter has only made the situation worst. 

“Russians are being plunged into a bleak winter where power outages and heating failures are already freezing people to death while President Vladimir Putin is choosing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars prosecuting an illegal war in Ukraine instead of helping his own citizens,” wrote Daily Beast's Anna Nemtsova. 

While Ukrainians are suffering from power cuts and no heating due to Russian missile strikes, citizens of Russia’s eastern republics and territories are freezing to death and being asked to contribute the most to the war, stripping these areas of their local workforces and sending their young men to die in Ukraine. 

“They take young men—the only breadwinners—away and send them back in coffins. The guys freeze on the front, get sick, die while their families live in poverty,” Valentina Melnikova, a prominent advocate from the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee. 

“It seems authorities have no interest left in human lives at this point,” Melnikova added. 

It may be this growing discontent in Russia’s outlying regions that has sparked government officials to forego New Year’s and instead try to appear to be working to better the lives of their people.