VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
Context
According to media reports, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, Chinese President Hu Jintao and President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko were the first to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his election as the new Russian President. A little later, on 5 March Vladimir Putin was congratulated over the phone by President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, King of Jordan Abdullah II, President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych, President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. They were followed by similar telephone calls from the Prime Ministers of the U.K. David Cameron and Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
On 5 March the U.S. State Department issued a special statement to congratulate the “Russian people” on the completion of the presidential elections, expressing the hope for “working with the President-elect after the election results are certified and he is sworn-in” (Vladimir Putin’s name is never mentioned in the text). At the same time the State Department called on the Russian Government “to conduct an independent, credible investigation of all reported electoral violations.”
Among those who sent their congratulations were the presidents of France Nicolas Sarcozy, Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Armenia Serzh Sargsyan and Italy Giorgio Napolitano.
Congratulatory messages were also sent by (in the order they were reported by the media) the heads of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Syria, Egypt, Kuwait, Abkhazia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Hungary, Iceland, the Republic of Korea, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Brazil, Vietnam, Nicaragua, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Lithuania, Mongolia and India.
On the evening of 6 March FIFA president Joseph Blatter sent his congratulations to the election winner.
