Friday, April 17, 2015

Putin Takes Questions: More Economy, Less Ukraine

By Neil MacFarquhar, April 16, 2015

MOSCOW — Sounding at times like a mayor promising to fix potholes and close noisy bars, President Vladimir V. Putin used his annual national call-in show on Thursday to try to reassure Russians that the country’s economic troubles were under control and that he shared their concerns on pocketbook issues.
If his marathon session in 2014 trumpeted the annexation of Crimea and issues of national pride, this year Mr. Putin fielded questions from acrossRussia on issues like dairy cow production, small-business loans and the rising price of car insurance.
Mr. Putin tried to paint an overall rosy picture of the economy, noting that the ruble had stabilized and strengthened even if inflation was over 11 percent. (Trading for as low as 80 to the dollar in December and volatile all winter, the ruble has risen to about 50; it was at 34 a year ago.)

“Experts see that we have passed the peak of the problems,” he said. “Nothing burst and everything works.” Mr. Putin promised tohelp dairy farmers get better distribution and prices for their milk; told unpaid workers at the new national space launch center that they would receive back pay; and vowed not to lower public wages nationally even if his economic advisers pressed. 
The questions came from reporters interviewing Russians in various corners of the country, the studio audience, callers and various forms of social media. The broadcasters said they had received more than three million questions, a record. Mr. Putin responded to roughly 70, and about half of them focused on the state of the economy. Mr. Putin said he had not heard that trucks trying to get onto the single ferry to Crimea often waited in line for two weeks. (It was notable that the first mention of Crimea, annexed by Russia from Ukraine last year, came about three hours and 40 minutes into the program.) 
When a weeping woman was interviewed from an area of Siberia devastated by wildfires this week, Mr. Putin spontaneously promised thousands of dollars to every family who had lost a loved one or property. Foreign policy issues did enter into the discussion, but the first question did not come until an hour into the program.
 And Mr. Putin repeated many of Russia’s earlier positions. The S-300 air defense system he had announced this week that Russia would deliver to Iran was a sale voluntarily suspended in 2010, he said, adding that it was a defensive weapon and that Russia could use the money, about $900 million. Although Ukraine was failing to fulfill the Minsk cease-fire agreements when it came to constitutional reform and financial support for the separatist regions, Russia would stick with the accord, he said. 
There are no Russian troops fighting in Ukraine now, he said, and there will be no war along Russia’s southwestern border. Mr. Putin took several pot shots at the United States, blaming it for the rise of the Islamic State, for example, through the destabilization of Iraq after the American-orchestrated overthrow of Saddam Hussein. And he accused Washington of pressuring world leaders into skipping Moscow’s celebration of the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Mr. Putin has two main public personas. 
There is the angry Putin who sometimes seems to sneer at the world and makes speeches like one exhorting security officers to stamp out internal threats. Then there is the “good,” avuncular Putin who was on display Thursday, giving mostly moderate answers to all manner of questions. In the fall, Mr. Putin suggested that to protect Russian speakers, Moscow would seize back territory in neighboring states — notably areas in southeastern Ukraine first seized by Catherine the Great. On Thursday, he took virtually the opposite tack. “We have no imperial ambitions,” he said, “but we can ensure a decent life to the people, including Russians, living abroad, in the neighboring countries of the former Soviet Union, by developing collaboration and cooperation.” Mr. Putin said he saw no reason for the city of Moscow to keep removing all the flowers and flags citizens were placing on the bridge where the opposition politician Boris Y. Nemtsov was assassinated in February, and said he would have a word with Moscow’s mayor about it. 
While Mr. Putin was speaking, however, a different face of Russia was on display in the capital. At a security conference across town, senior members of the military said Russia wanted global cooperation on issues like combating terrorism, but would not stand idly by as NATO expanded eastward. And security officers raided the Moscow headquarters of Open Russia, an organization funded by Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, the jailed oil oligarch turned political exile. 
This year’s studio audience was notable in that many of those called upon were often critical of Mr. Putin, and one television host, Kirill Kleymenov, asked tough questions. But when topics seemed too closely linked to the president, he threw them right back at the questioner. At one point, Mr. Kleymenov suggested that Mr. Putin’s main economic policy seemed to be waiting for the price of oil to recover, a question Mr. Putin called “overly critical.” 
Mr. Putin evoked the hated 1990s government economists who, in the view of many Russians, pursued a misguided policy of capitalist shock therapy that ushered in a decade of instability and poverty. Russians revile them, and Mr. Putin’s popularity in his third term as president rests in no small part on the fact that until last fall, the economy was stable and wages increased steadily along with the price of oil for much of the past 15 years. “In order to build up economic policy competently, of course, you need a brain,” Mr. Putin said. “But if we want people to trust us, we also need a heart and need to feel how an ordinary man lives.”  
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