‘To kill the civilian economy is to kill the country’: Moscow mayor rejects calls to put Russia’s economy on a war footing
Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said shifting the economy onto a war footing would kill the country, speaking in an interview with Andrey Kondrashov, director general of the Russian state news agency TASS:
We keep hearing talk about the need to mobilize the entire economy, redirect it toward war, and so on. But a modern economy is built differently. If there’s no economy of peaceful life itself, there will be no taxes, no income for the population, the political situation will be completely different, and then we won’t achieve success in the war either. And to kill life, to kill the civilian economy, is to kill the country itself.
Sobyanin called any discussion of shifting the economy to a war footing “worthless” and “unnecessary.”
On August 4, Andrey Kolesnik, a deputy in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament, and a member of its Defense Committee, said Russia needed to shift the economy “onto a war footing” and begin “normal military operations,” citing intensified strikes by Ukraine’s armed forces on Russian territory.
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