The programme of subsidising education loans Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised students as of December 1 was never launched. The paperwork is held up by the Justice Ministry. The government has kept loans for students at the annual rate of 5% on its agenda, but the banks are not in a hurry to grant them, citing the high cost of borrowed money.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has signed a Federal Targeted Programme (FTP) “The Development of Television and Radio Broadcasting in the Russian Federation in 2009-2015”.
The Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman completed his visit to Moscow at the end of last week by having talks with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Three days after the crash of the Neva Express there was a blast on a railway in Dagestan, which attracted far less attention because it claimed no victims. Vladimir Putin said there was a link between the two terrorist attacks, but many in Dagestan attribute the explosive situation in the region not so much to the increased activity of the militants as the approaching change of government.
Vladimir Putin has held a diagnostic meeting with the country’s population: he heard all the “case histories” and issued recipes and prescriptions.
How profound is the programme of political modernisation initiated by the president? What does "being in opposition" mean in Russia? Is it possible to create another governing party committed to modernising the country? Itogy has put these questions to the leader of Just Russia party and speaker of the Federation Council, Sergey Mironov.
Because serious discussion of politics and economics is comparatively new in this country, we tend to overestimate the opinion of practitioners. Politicians and business people have recently defended rafts of doctoral dissertations: this is of course absurd, and one can safely leave these dissertations unread. A professional politician or a businessman has as much chance of producing a meaningful research paper as a scientist to make millions trading on the stock exchange in the after hours or to become the country’s president without leaving his study. However, outside the scholarly world, things are more complicated: we often trust the words of practitioners even when they do not know whereof they speak.
Putin’s live phone-ins during which he talks directly with the citizens is becoming the longest and one of the most popular annual TV extravaganzas.
On December 3, the Prime Minister answered questions from the Russian people in a live phone-in programme (you can read the transcript on our site kp.ru). Immediately after the broadcast bureaucrats at all levels began to react. The reactions varied, however.
Vladimir Putin has reviewed the summary of the Cherkizovsky Market closure. He said the move gave a boost to domestic production in Russia.