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
Yesterday, the Government summarised the interim results of the state property privatisation programme. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that the failure to meet the programme targets had become a standard practice. The crisis has also played a role in this. Therefore, the Government decided to revise the approach to state property privatisation. For now, only the property worth less than 5 million roubles will be offered for privatisation. The rest will be put on hold until better times.
An expedition of the Russian Academy of Sciences went to the taiga to watch the Amur tigress on which Vladimir Putin put a GPS collar last autumn. I accompanied the team as Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent.
The Western wave of anti-crisis strikes, mass meetings and picketing has not reached Russia yet. Therefore, the Russian Government has probably decided to take some preventive action before it happens, first of all to talk to trade union leaders.
Russia is pursuing active diplomacy to achieve a revision of the Brussels gas agreements between the European Union and Ukraine. According to Kommersant, it will be a key issue during a visit of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to Germany on March 31.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Wednesday met with representatives of trade unions for what would be the first public discussion of the government’s anti-crisis programme. Kommersant’s special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov reports on the impressive launch of a nationwide public debate on stimulus and bailout policies.
The current financial and economic crisis will not influence the Government’s plans to overhaul the pension system. Pensions will be raised on schedule, while employers will have to pay more into the Pension Fund. The unified social tax will be replaced with insurance premiums.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met yesterday with Chairman of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions Mikhail Shmakov and the heads of primary trade unions. The number of registered unemployed in mid-March was about two million people (in fact, the unofficial figure is six million, as revealed by President Dmitry Medvedev). Another million have a shorter working day or are on forced leaves, and about 500,000 people are slated for layoffs. Despite that, both Mr Putin and Mr Shmakov wanted to say something encouraging to each other. And they did.
The State Duma addressed the issue of international adoption a day after Russian President Medvedev held a meeting on crimes against children. The lower house said it was “seriously concerned about the death of Russian children adopted by foreign nationals and taken out of Russia.”
The Council of the lower house of Parliament yesterday approved questions for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s report to the State Duma.
It was reported the other day that US President Barack Obama appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on NBC, becoming the first US President to sit on a late night chat/comedy show.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday chaired a Security Council meeting convened to discuss Russia’s national security strategy until 2020. The document was presented by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev.
In the first ten days of April, a commission of the United Russia party will complete the certification of Vladimir Putin’s reception offices in the regions, and may subsequently fire some of their ineffective managers. Irina Nagornykh, a special correspondent of this newspaper, says the Prime Minister’s reception office in Moscow is bustling with activity, with people willing to entrust their personal problems to Mr Putin.
Russian experts remain at a loss trying to figure out whether the country's economic system will follow the European or the Russian model amid the current global crisis.
Yesterday each State Duma party submitted to the Duma Organisation and Regulation Committee three questions for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, which he is supposed to answer when delivering an annual report to the Duma. The date of the Prime Minister’s address was pushed back from April 2 to April 6.
Participants in the last Davos forum describe how a top manager at a Russian government bank visualized the future of the global financial system. According to him, the financial system will not change. A crisis like this one takes place once in 60 years. Nobody will live to see the next one, so why change anything at all?
Implementation of all socio-economic projects in Chechnya will be continued. This statement was made by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin during his meeting with Ramzan Kadyrov, at which the Chechen President reviewed the situation in the region.
What exactly will Prime Minister Vladimir Putin officially open in July if there is only dirt, grass, and two cowsheds instead of the Azov-City Gambling Zone?
A scandal along the corridors of the Kremlin continues for more than a week now. The uproar was provoked by one of President Medvedev’s unofficial advisors, Yevgeny Gontmakher, who publicly described Vladislav Surkov as “the Mikhail Suslov of our time” [Suslov was a prominent figure in the Communist Party, a key political ideologist during the Stalin years and beyond]. Gontmakher explained that Surkov is defending the current political system because discussions about reforms that have not been staged in advance in the Cabinet threaten Surkov’s own position of the nation’s main ideologist rather that public tranquillity.
“In 2000, business did not feel any special pressure from the authorities. There were only two victims, and both were obsessed with politics – Berezovsky and Gusinsky,” a prominent businessman recalled. Even at that time, Boris Berezovsky himself believed that Vladimir Putin was obliged to send him to prison if he considered this a rational step.
The global economic crisis and the effect it has on Russia have been widely discussed by our media organisations. Today, we will give the floor to two radically different points of view, two voices which do not belong to supporters of the Government’s policy. We offer you several excerpts from a report by politician Boris Nemtsov and economist Vladimir Milov (text is given according to the website www.nemtsov.ru), and some commentaries by economists Vladislav Inozemtsev and Nikita Krichevsky, known for their articles published in many newspapers, including Nezavisimaya Gazeta. We hope that this article, regardless of the offshoots of our political discourse, will serve as a useful exchange of views.
