Kursk Nuclear Power Plant employees are forced to donate money for buying gifts to the Russian army, Vazhniye Istorii reports citing an anonymous plant worker.
He says the order to donate money came from the Mayor of Kurchatov, Igor Korpunkov. According to Vazhniye Istorii’s source, the same order came to various other establishments: “My subordinate's mother works at a school, the same thing is happening there.”
In his order addressed to the NPP director, Korpunkov writes that he counts on “personal support and the patriotic stance of the collective.” The application form says NPP employees are to “donate” money as part of the Hour of Work campaign for the “Fund to Support Urban Initiatives”. The source told Vazhniye Istorii that about 90% of the employees have already filled out the “donation forms” committing 200-400 rubles. He says he has refused to donate so far, so his boss wouldn’t let him hear the end of it.
According to him, such requisitions take place regularly at the NPP: “This is already perceived as a kind of tax. But, probably, even if they start charging for admission, we will keep coming anyway - there are no other jobs nearby.”
The Hour of Work campaign was launched by residents of Kurchatov. It’s about donating the equivalent of the hourly wage to the Russian army. The money thus collected is supposed to be spent “on purchasing gifts for [...] the participants of the special military operation who are on the front line”. Korpunkov himself donated his salary at the end of July. In the comments under his post about the campaign, city residents asked whether the money was guaranteed to reach the recipients, and whether a report on the collection and expenditures would be published. They got no answers.
The Fund to Support Urban Initiatives was created at the behest of Korpunkov in 2016. Since 2017, it has been headed by Yevgeny Sakharov, a United Russia deputy of the Kurchatov City Duma of the sixth convocation, one of the co-owners of the municipal unified information and accounting center. In 2021, the Fund to Support Urban Initiatives reported to have received almost 50 million rubles in donations.