Putin believes it is wrong to give money to people stuck at home and left without income. "If we give it to everyone, the budget will crack," Sobyanin adds in his latest interview. ⠀ Interesting logic. At the very same hour Sobyanin said this, I was reading an article saying that, already during the epidemic, Moscow City Hall had allocated 12 billion rubles for urban improvement projects. ⠀ Journalists from the outlet *Baza* (easy to find online) visited the places where this "improvement" is supposed to happen and found that it will amount to yet another round of replacing paving tiles in areas where they were laid not that long ago. ⠀ So allocating 12,000,000,000 rubles for graft won't make Sobyanin's budget crack. And in any case, re-laying tiles right now, in the middle of a crisis, is hardly the top priority. ⠀ You know, in our country there are more than half a million mothers raising children alone and receiving no child support. Divide 12 billion by 500,000 and you get 24,000 rubles per person—money that could be transferred right now to someone who is already struggling, and who now is also out of work and out of money. ⠀ But no—*that* would make the "budget crack." An official's face, though, never will.