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
According to Mr Gryzlov, given shrinking state revenues, the population could join the investment process: the anti-crisis plan should identify 10-15 state-backed priority construction projects. The broad masses could contribute to financing these projects by buying non-inscribed investment bonds, some of which would be issued by the Finance Ministry, Mr Gryzlov elaborated his dream that harked back to the Soviet-era projects of the Baikal-Amur Railway and the Virgin Lands development.
Russia is ready to propose to the United Arab Emirates joint projects in the sphere of space exploration, the nuclear industry and of course the power industry, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday during a meeting in Moscow with the Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and the Ruler of Dubai, Mohammed Al Maktoum.
Initially the G20 summit, which is due to begin in London tomorrow, was expected to come up with revolutionary solutions. High-ranking Russian and Chinese representatives spoke of the need to replace the dollar with a supranational currency and Russia even tabled it as an official motion. True, this week Presidential Aide Arkady Dvorkovich specified that this was an idea for the future and that our country would be happy to join the general discussion rather than pressing for its own agenda to be adopted.
Vladimir Putin yesterday met with the Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
The world crisis and the weakening of the US, which may lead to that country’s disintegration, will change the geopolitical map of the world. Over the next few years the former USSR countries will rally around Russia to form a new Eurasian Union with a single currency, parliament and Vladimir Putin as its ruler. The Eurasian Union will be modelled on the European Union as a result of which there will be three power centres in the world: China, EU-1 and EU-2. The author of this sensational forecast is Professor Igor Panarin, Doctor of Political Science from the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited AvtoVAZ on Monday. His visit was a windfall for Russia’s largest automaker and its workers. The auto giant’s stocks surged 40% as a result.
The economy may be in recession, but political parties are plowing on through their usual cycles without reaction to a minor thing like economic crisis. Political routines are inviolable and cannot be affected by time or trouble. If Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is scheduled to meet with party leaders he will do so, whatever happens. Only this time the meeting was formally devoted to the Government’s bailout plan, a high-profile policy issue.
The Russian President decided to take a leaf out of Vladimir Putin’s book. Not only did he board a fighter jet, but he told the BBC channel he was ready to pose topless. That was a joke of course, but he made it perfectly clear to the BBC host that major decisions in modern Russia are made by the president. The incumbent president, that is.
Vladimir Putin has expressed a willingness to adjust the government’s anti-crisis measures after discussions with opposition leaders. The opposition, however, is not ready to support the new budget.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau posed a question some 250 years ago: Is law based governance possible and reliable? The philosopher could not give an unequivocal answer to his question. The principle of “social contract” that he formulated was a rather abstract concept. In recent months, Russian analysts, following Lenin’s methodology, have been quickly moving from the abstract to something more real. The new social contract for Russia is discussed by Yevgeny Gontmakher and Alexander Auzan, Andrei Kolesnikov and Andrei Piontkovsky. The declared objective is extremely ambitious – to re-constitute Russia.
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.
Recently, well-known opposition politicians Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov released a joint report entitled “Putin and the Crisis” (presented at the Nezavisimaya Gazeta on February 20). The report once again drew the attention of the public to the deplorable state of the Russian economy and the inadequacy of many Government decisions.
Yesterday, President Obama’s personal photographer Pete Souza surprised his photo-journalist colleagues in the US and in Russia by making a sensational discovery in his old film.
The first direct elections of regional leaders were held in Moscow, St Petersburg and Tatarstan on June 12, 1991, simultaneously with the first presidential elections. By that time, the Russian republics were granted the right to elect their Presidents.
Pensions will be increased four times this year. The miners of Kuzbass, which the Prime Minister visited last week, were the first to learn the details.
In recent time, Russia and America remind us of polar opposites who have become twins. Having looked into the abyss of the economic crisis, Yankees gave up on the free market principles and started using federal money in the spirit of the Soviet State Planning Committee. But isn’t this similarity purely external? Won’t the crisis increase our lag behind the developed world? Director of Russian and Asian Programmes at the Washington-based Centre for Defence Information Nikolai Zlobin gave an affirmative answer to both questions. Are they twins or opposites?
Moscow has been hosting Old Timer Gallery, the largest vintage car show in Eastern Europe, for the last seven years.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Centre (GKNPT) yesterday and pledged to allocate over eight billion roubles to support the industry. Kommersant’s Andrei Kolesnikov couldn’t help but notice that while some were trying to save the industry, others were helping to destroy it – by welding the seams improperly.
The Supervisory Board of the Agency for Housing Mortgage Lending (AHML) is considering the agency’s business plan for the first half of 2009, and a forecast plan for the second half of the year.
Mr Putin proposed a detailed review of all the anti-crisis measures and decisions implemented so far and, based on the results of the review, preparing a comprehensive document comprising both the decisions made and the new plans through end of 2009. The document, according to the Prime Minister, will be submitted to the State Duma together with the budget bills and will be published in the media.
During his meeting with Mongolian Prime Minister Sanjaagiin Bayar in Moscow yesterday, Vladimir Putin urged the need to protect Russian companies working in Mongolia. The laws On Minerals and On Tax on Growing Prices for Some Types of Products adopted two years ago seriously infringe upon the interests of Russian investors, who have lost $2.5 billion of their profits. The Mongolian Prime Minister promised to look into the situation, but independent experts believe the chances of an out-of-court settlement of the conflict are nil. In their opinion, Ulan-Bator will fight to the last to uphold its right to determine the level of taxes on joint ventures.
After returning from Brussels, where the modernisation of the Ukrainian gas transportation system (GTS) will be discussed on March 23, Yulia Tymoshenko will go to Moscow on March 27 for talks with Vladimir Putin. The meeting will be part of the session of the sub-commission on trade and economic cooperation.
Vladimir Putin met his Mongolian counterpart Sanjaagiin Bayar yesterday.
Russia’s entry into the world economic crisis prompted some experts and public personalities to declare that the “tacit contract” between the authorities and society needs to be revised. Those who initiated the discussion proceeded on the assumption that the current contract is both social and economic in character. They claimed that Russian citizens had voluntarily traded their rights and freedoms for higher living standards. However, now that the crisis is upon us, the oil bonanza has ended and incomes are falling, the contract should be declared null and void and citizens should get their rights and freedoms back.
The small opposition in Tatarstan is eagerly discussing the latest rumours circulating in the capital. Allegedly, Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the Federation Council, who is also the leader of the Just Russia party, was recently granted an audience with President Dmitry Medvedev and complained about the results of the elections in Tatarstan on March 1.
It would not be easy to find a person who is happy with the current situation. The country needs change. The question is what should be changed and who will administer it. It is good that we always have supporters of genuine democracy and real capitalism. But it is bad that their practical recipes are often muddled.
During a meeting with miners Prime Minister Putin made a slip of the tongue. Speaking about Ukraine he said that Gazprom did not intend to penalise a neighbour who is “facing default” for failing to take off all the gas contracted for because “one does not kick a partner who is down”. What he said was new both from the point of view of the Russian language and traditional morality. You “do not kick an enemy who is down”. As for “partner” you normally “support a partner”, “don’t leave a partner in need”, “agree” with him or “warn” or at worst “break up” with a partner. The expression “kick a partner who is down” is almost an oxymoron which describes a very peculiar type of business relations.
Elections of the mayors of large cities is one of the few areas of political life that has so far escaped a purge. The mayors are elected by universal secret ballot and you do not have to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures to be registered as a candidate. Instead you can make a money deposit.
A congress of the members of the United Russia cadre reserve took place in Oryol on Saturday. On behalf of the head of the party’s Supreme Council, Boris Gryzlov, the first two hundred letters of recommendation were handed to those who, in the party’s opinion, were high-level professionals and strong state supporters. The party will soon make a short list of the top 300 managers who have a chance to make it to the presidential personnel pool. Kommersant has learned the names of some of them.
Gennady Timchenko, co-owner of the Swiss oil trader Gunvor and Bank Rossiya, has filed a libel suit against The Economist magazine with the High Court in London. Mr Timchenko worked with Vladimir Putin at St Petersburg Mayor’s Office in the early 1990s. He is co-founder of the judo club Yavara-Neva fund of which Vladimir Putin is the honorary president. In November last year The Economist carried an article about rampant corruption in Russia.
Life in the Urals has become harder. People here read their destiny from the pillars of acrid black smoke rising from the chimneys of the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant (MMK)….
