Russia’s Putin Says Why He Decided to Run for President

In the run-up to Russia’s presidential election prime minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin has shared his views on the challenges the country is facing and assessed the situation in the country.

An article named “Russia in focus – the challenges we must face” was published on Putin’s campaign website and in the Izvestia newspaper at midnight on Sunday.

The program is in part the prime minister and presidential hopeful’s answer to people unhappy with the current political environment, and who took to the streets in December to stage Russia’s biggest protest in two decades, reports Russia Today.

On why he agreed to run in the country’s 2012 presidential elections, he wrote: “I do not want and will not belittle anyone’s achievements in the establishment of a new country… But the fact remains that in 1999 when I became head of government and then later president — the country was in a deep systemic crisis,” he said in an article published in Izvestia.

He underlined his role and the role of his loyalists in “taking Russia out of the deadlock of civil war, cracking down on terrorism, restoring the country’s territorial integrity and constitutional order, boosting the economy and securing one of the world’s fastest rates of economic growth over the last ten years.”

He concluded, though there are a lot of unsolved problems ahead, “we are capable of turning them for our good.”