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
Traders yesterday fell a few kopecks short of testing the Central Bank’s promise to keep the national currency at the level of 41 roubles for a two-currency basket. Trading at MICEX closed yesterday with the dollar at 36.2 roubles, but the Central Bank was unperturbed. And indeed, nobody chose to attack the rouble, which has approached the announced limit, and it is even less likely today: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin explained the day before that the issues of additional capitalisation of banks and currency speculation would be linked.
The economic crisis and the gas war with Ukraine overshadowed some notable shifts that have been happening in the relations between Russia and the West in recent weeks. Russia, for the first time recently, took real steps to normalise the relations: It resumed dialogue with NATO and announced that it would not deploy its Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad Region.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin held a meeting with Siemens AG President Peter Löscher,and President of the state corporation Rosatom Sergei Kiriyenko at the White House yesterday. The meeting sent an important signal to the world nuclear industry. The Prime Minister said that Rosatom and Siemens were ready for a full-scale strategic partnership in the nuclear energy field. The fact that the announcement was first made by Mr Putin and not by the immediate parties involved, shows that the decision has high-level support. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is expected to express her position on the issue at a meeting between the German energy agency and Russia’s Mosenergo in Berlin today. “We are ready to pass on from one-off projects to forging a full-scale partnership between Siemens and the Russian Rosatom. We could work actively both in Russia and in Germany, as well as in the markets of third countries,” Mr Putin said.
Transport Minister Igor Levitin spent three days in Sochi to inspect transport infrastructural construction and summarised what he had seen for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and an International Olympic Committee delegation.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin managed to demonstrate his fluency in German at the 74th International Green Week Berlin exhibition, Volgograd Region Governor Nikolai Maksyuta told a press conference. The exhibition took place January 16 through 25 in Germany.
On February 2, Cuban President Raúl Castro met with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as part of his visit in Moscow. The meeting summed up the remarkable results of the Caribbean state leader’s visit, with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreeing to grant multi-million dollar state loans to Cuba. Interestingly, it is reported that the sum finally agreed by the two presidents turned out to be 18 times higher than initially planned.
Many think that the Kremlin owes its consolidated power and dominion over the public to nothing but exorbitant oil prices of the recent years. But then, Vladimir Putin received public support even when oil went for $40 a barrel. He started as the President of Hope and a clever psychotherapist who would say nothing that might upset his patients.
The concept of "Russia as a safe haven" was presented at the Davos forum a year ago. It was assumed then that amid the world financial crisis, which was widely expected, the Russian markets would remain stable. "Interest in Russia as an island of stability will grow," the Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin was trying to convince the world economic elite. "The US economy is on the edge of recession and world economic growth is slowing down," he said.
The April 2009 deadline for the start of the active phase of the construction of Olympic facilities may not be met. Independent experts think that the authorities have not yet put in place the legal framework for a civilized approach to the confiscation of land owned by Sochi’s residents for the building of Olympic facilities.
The election of the Patriarch the Russian Orthodox Church proved that, for all its flaws, it was a far more vibrant and democratic organism than the Russian state. The contest for the throne of the Patriarch was far more dramatic than that for the presidency and attracted almost as much interest.
