Epress.am News from Armenia
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is currently holding his annual live question and answer session with the Russian pubic, amidst protests over his rule and election fraud. Follow @MiriamElder and @ioffeinmoscow on Twitter and The Guardian online for live updates (below).
8:45 am: Why does Putin want to do a third presidential stint, someone asks?
No clear answer on this one. Putin seems to be implying that he’s the only person who can deal with “terrorists” from the North Caucasus.
He says “a lot has been achieved” but more work has to be done to strengthen the system and make it “stable” — shorthand for Putin’s non-democratic regime. All rather vague.
8:24 am: Although he doesn’t say this directly, it’s clear that Putin has no intention of re-running Russia’s 4 December Duma elections – a key demand of the protesters who rallied in their tens of thousands last Saturday.
Putin now says “we should get away” from the topic of elections. But he has a quick swipe at “color revolutions” saying they are a “scheme” to destabilize countries. (He mentions the 2004 pro-western uprising in Ukraine.) In other words the pro-democracy protests are a western plot! He says the white ribbons worn by protesters in Russia “look like contraceptives,” adding they “look like they are fighting AIDS.”
He also has a go at Russia’s liberal opposition. “I actually know they paid some young people to attend this rally,” he says, of the protests against his rule. This is a bit rich, actually. There’s no evidence for this.
8:12 am: Putin says the unprecedented protests against his rule are “perfectly normal”. He says demonstrators are allowed to take to the streets “so long as they stay within the law.”
He also comes up with a suggestion: that surveillance cameras should be installed in all 90,000 polling stations in Russia for the country’s presidential election. Interesting idea, but will surveillance cameras really stop fraud, I wonder?
8:04 am: It is one of the highlights of Russia’s political year: Vladimir Putin’s annual phone-in with the Russian people. But this year’s broadcast takes place against the backdrop of unprecedented protests against his rule. Last weekend more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Moscow to protest against massive fraud in Russia’s Dec. 4 parliamentary elections, They were won — officially at least — by Putin’s United Russia party. (Support for the party slumped to below 50%, despite numerous violations and alleged ballot-box stuffing.) There were similar expressions of discontent across Russia.
Putin, Russia’s PM, has already announced that he intends to stand in Russia’s Mar. 4 presidential election, swapping jobs with the current president, Dmitry Medvedev. The key question now is how Putin — faced with the most serious public challenge to his 12-year rule — will respond? Will he make concessions to demands for greater political pluralism? Or will he, as seems more likely, crush what’s been dubbed the “Russian Spring”?