“Beginning from March 1 and ending on December 31, 2015, pay the president of the Russian Federation (Putin), the head of the government of the Russian Federation (Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev)…their monthly salaries and quarterly bonuses with a decrease of 10 percent,” the order on the press service’s site reads.
The Presidential Administration will get pay cuts beginning on May 1, according to the order.
On February 24, State Duma House Speaker Sergei Naryshkin, Russia's lower house of parliament speaker, announced that Russia’s lower house of parliament intended to ask the Russian president to cut wages to lawmakers in order to correct the 2015 federal budget.
The Russian economy has been experiencing a slowdown, caused mainly by the rapid decrease in oil prices, on which the Russian budget is heavily dependent. Western economic sanctions imposed on Moscow over the situation in Ukraine have also hit several key sectors of the economy.
In January, the Russian government unveiled an anti-crisis plan set to stabilize the country's economy by 2017. The plan stipulates 10-percent spending cuts in most categories of the 2015 budget.
