MOSCOW, January 19. /TASS/. Russian Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said on Tuesday that the federal budget should not be sequestered as it had scarce resources for social support measures.

"They [the government] are proposing to further sequester the budget but it has already been slashed considerably," he told journalists.

According to Zyuganov, "every second person in Russia lives on 15,000 rubles [$190] per month or less. Moreover, the value of this sum has halved over the past year."

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said earlier that budget expenditures should be cut by 10%, except for "protected budget items," to save 512 billion rubles ($6.5 billion) in his estimates.

As the Russian finance minister explained, ministries and departments will receive budget appropriations this year and determine the priorities of this spending, choose themselves the basic and most effective expenditures and cut ineffective expenses.

The finance minister said further that these measures could not be called a sequester, which implied cutting budget spending, cancelling contracts and breaching contractual obligations.