OREANDA-NEWS Russian air carriers have started to cancel flights en masse across the country due to the reduction of state subsidies by 1.5 billion rubles. This was reported on Thursday, May 4, by Izvestia with reference to representatives of airlines, as well as a source close to the Ministry of Transport.

For comparison, in 2022, nine billion rubles were allocated to domestic carriers for regional flights, in 2023 the government allocated 7.5 billion for these purposes.

According to the publication, the main reason for the reduction in the amount of subsidies was the state budget deficit. "Rosaviation approached the issue formally: they removed from the program those routes for which airlines have not yet concluded agreements on co—financing flights with regional authorities," said a source in the industry.

Airlines have already begun to adjust flight programs. Thus, the largest number of cancellations affected flights in the Omsk and Tyumen regions, Tatarstan, St. Petersburg, Dagestan and North Ossetia.

According to Andrey Kramarenko, a leading specialist at the HSE Center for Transport Economics, those destinations where the cancellation of flights will not cause a big wave of discontent among Russians have fallen under funding cuts. "If funding for flights to the Far East were cut, there would be outrage," he said.

Earlier it became known that in 2023, the government also sharply reduced subsidies to the country's southern airports, temporarily closed due to a special military operation in Ukraine. So, for the first quarter of this year, the government agreed to allocate 2.5 billion rubles.