Page 24 - RusRPTJun19

2.14 Politics - misc
A regional Sukhoi Superjet 100 (SSJ-100) airliner operated by Russian flag carrier Aeroflot crashed at Moscow Sheremetyevo airport on May 5 shortly after taking off for a regular flight to Murmansk. Out of 78 people on board, 41 people reportedly did not survive the crash.
Russia's government has issued a decree, which simplifies arms re-sales and re-exports to third countries, lifting the previously mandatory procedure of federal certification for all resellers down the sales chain, Vedomosti daily reported on May 15 citing the decree as of May 10.
Russia’s Audit Chamber recently noted the lack of real income growth among the population. This criticism of the Deputy PMs’ work in implementing the national projects is a sign of growing tensions between Alexei Kudrin and PM Medvedev’s cabinet. Kudrin’s absence from a meeting about the strategic development of national projects also suggests increasing confrontation between him and the government.
Rural development program to receive more money The Commission on the Agro-Industrial Complex, Minister of Agriculture Dmitriy Patrushev discussed the newest draft of the government program for the development of villages. The program will cost RUB2.28 trillion ($35.5bn), he says, although it would take RUB6 trillion ($93bn) to do the job right. The new development program is ambitious. Its primary goals are to increase the correlation between incomes in the country and the city and to stop the flow of people from the villages to urban areas. The current situation in villages is bad. Unemployment is twice as high as in cities (8%), as is the percentage of the population below the poverty line (20%). In the previous five-year period, only RUB170bn ($2.6bn) of federal money were spent on the countryside. Most of the money will be spent on improving rural infrastructure. Patrushev foresees only one- third of the money being allocated to social spending.
That United Russia is facing some difficult times isn’t news: the party’s rating nosedived from 49% to 35% after the adoption of the pension reform last year, a fall it is yet to recover from. One consequence has been the increasing number of Kremlin-backed politicians or officials attempting to distance themselves from the party: of the 16 Kremlin candidates for the September gubernatorial elections, at least six might run as independent candidates, RBC reported last week. With gubernatorial and local elections only three months away, United Russia is currently going through its primaries and here too, the temptation to go solo is strong: Irkutsk mayor Dmitry
24 RUSSIA Country Report June 2019 www.intellinews.com