Comparison: How the Regime “Helps” Migrants and Belarusian Citizens

Approximate, but very eloquent calculations.

Aliaksandr Lukashenka recently told how much our country (read: its taxpayers) has already spent on helping refugees trying to get through Belarus to the European Union. Intex-press correlated this figure with other state expenditures and also compared the costs of supporting migrants with the costs of supporting Belarusians in difficult life situations.

We should mention right away that it is almost impossible to calculate to the penny the costs of maintaining migrants in Belarus, as, firstly, we do not know their exact number (different sources name different figures, moreover, rounded), and secondly, no financial statements on their detention in the public domain can be found.

Nevertheless, the official statements, in which every now and then one or another figure slips through, have allowed us to make, albeit approximate, but very eloquent calculations.

So, let's start with the amount announced by Aliaksandr Lukashenka on November 26 during his visit to a refugee camp on the Belarusian-Polish border.

“After my statement yesterday, the pitiful 260,000 were allocated. They transferred 260 thousand dollars to our Red Cross. We calculated three days earlier: we spent 12.6 million dollars on all these events,” Lukashenka said at the time.

Naturally, he did not specify what kind of "events" were included in this amount and where these millions of dollars came from. But, be that as it may, this money is rather big for our country. For example, they will be enough to hold one and a half referendums on changing the country's Constitution.

For Baranavichy, $ 12.6 million is almost an eighth of the annual budget! And this money would be enough to completely reconstruct three such stadiums as Baranavichy Lokomotiv.

Now, as for the expenditures on the maintenance of migrants. The other day, Dmitry Shevtsov, Secretary-General of the Belarusian Red Cross Society, said in an interview to one of the state channels that only "10000 euros a day is spent on food. That is, if we start from the figure of 2000 people (this is the number of migrants, according to the Belarusian officials, who are in the logistics center at the border), it is 5 Euro (about 14,4 roubles) per day for each person. And this, we remind you, is only for food.

Now let's compare how much money the state spends on its citizens who find themselves in a difficult life situation. Take, for example, statistics on the provision of targeted social assistance to low-income citizens in Baranavichy for 9 months of 2021 (this is the most recent statistics that we were able to find in the public domain).

During this period, 3,012 people received financial assistance from the state for a total of 1.23 million rubles. Using the method of simple mathematical calculations, it turns out that, for each poor person in Baranovichi, an average of 410 rubles was allocated for this period, which equals 45.5 rubles a month or about 1.5 rubles a day. That is, almost 10 times less.