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Eastern Europe
April 7, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 15
motivated” as part of Navalny’s bid for the presidency in next year’s elections. “Those that benefit are those who order such [compromising] stories. As a rule, these are the people who pursue specific political ends,” Medvedev said during a visit to a factory in the town of Tambov in response to a question on the allegations.
Commentators have speculated that Medvedev is damaged goods and could soon lose his job. He has been held up as a possible successor to Putin, who is supposed to retire in 2024, assuming he wins next year’s election.
The government, which Medvedev heads, was also caught up in the flack, with its approval rating dropping from 49% in February to 43% in March. While the people of Russia love Putin, they have never been especially enamoured with the government, which has struggled to reach a 50% approval rating.
Putin says Russia resolved $700mn gas debt and other disputes with Belarus
bne IntelliNews
Russia and Belarus will settle “issues in the
oil and gas sphere” within ten days, President Vladimir Putin said on April 3 after talks with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko aimed at resolving a row over $700mn that Moscow says Minsk must pay for past natural gas supplies.
“No disputed issues remain to date,” Putin said after the consultations in the northern city of St
What effect all this brouhaha will have on the population’s feelings about the direction the country is taking remains to be seen. In a separate Levada poll that measures this sentiment, the government has been doing okay, with more than half the population believing Russia is going in the “right direction”, although the score fell to 52% in March from 53% a month earlier.
Indeed, the March 26 protests were a surprise,
as Levada’s poll in December found that the propensity to protest was at record lows. Defenders of Russia have pointed out that the approximately 60,000 that took to the streets at the end of March are a tiny fraction of the country’s 146mn citizens and so not representative of the general mood of the country. Whereas detractors of the government pointed out that the mood has changed as these protests were predominantly held in the regions and young 20-somethings participated, which is new and must be unsettling for the authorities.
Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko thrashed out a raft of disputes at talks on April 3.
Petersburg, adding that the two sides had agreed a roadmap for energy cooperation up to 2020.
Speaking at a joint news briefing after the talks, Lukashenko confirmed the deal and thanked Putin for helping refinance his country’s debts to Russia. “I very much regret that things happened as they did, but we must stick together and our peoples must see this, as we showed today,” he said, shaking hands at the podium with Putin.