Reducing Russian budget expenditures is not sequestration. Russian President Vladimir Putin stated this in an interview with Channel One and the Associated Press agency.

According to him, sequestration is a crude reduction in spending by a certain amount, regardless of priorities, which is not observed in the Russian Federation. Putin explained the need to cut spending by saying that the country's economy is growing more slowly this year than expected. The President clarified that the spending cuts will affect both investment and social budget items.

Putin first announced the impending budget cuts on September 1 at a meeting with teachers and students of the Far Eastern Federal University. He explained the need for such a measure by the fact that the world economy has “sat down”, and the Russian one is “squatting down” after it.

It is unclear which countries Putin had in mind when he said that the world economy had “fallen”. Perhaps this meant a crisis in the European Union, but in the first half of this year the EU showed signs of recovery. US GDP growth in the first months of the year was also higher than expected.

The Russian Federation's GDP growth forecast for this year has been revised twice. In April, the Ministry of Economic Development estimated that the Russian economy this year should grow by 2.4 percent, and not by 3.6 percent, as previously expected. In August, the department lowered the forecast to 1.8 percent. In the first half of the year, the Russian economy grew by 1.4 percent, while in January-June 2012 the growth was 4.5 percent.

Putin asked not to call the upcoming spending cuts sequestration