Premier Putin to hold his ninth Q & A session with Russians.

MOSCOW, December 16 (Itar-Tass) - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir
Putin will hold his ninth annual Q & A session with the people of Russia
on Thursday, December 16.
A special program titled "A Conversation with Vladimir Putin,
Continued" will go on air on the Russia 1 and Russia 24 television
channels at midday on Thursday. The Mayak and the Voice of Russia radio
stations will also broadcast the program live.
The main studio from which the prime minister is going to answer
questions will be located in the Gostinyi Dvor building near the Kremlin.
The government press service reports that this year the Russians are
showing more interest in dialogue with Vladimir Putin than in 2009.
"The interest is higher than it was in 2009, though at that time it
was also high," Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov told Itar-Tass. He
added that Putin had already received more than 600,000 questions and that
their number kept growing.
Peskov said that the most burning issues included salaries, the living
standards, housing, pensions and social benefits. "Some questions
concerned inter-ethnic strife," Peskov went on to say. According to him,
questions are coming from all sorts of people. Young people usually send
SMS messages while the older generation prefers putting questions by phone.
Russians also pose their questions on the www.moskva-putin.ru website.
The most frequent questions concern changes of retirement age, a
possibility of using the maternal capital for children's medical treatment
and employment in one-industry towns. The Russians also worry that the
financing of the 2018 World Football Cup will produce a negative impact on
the economic and social situation in Russia.
Peskov said that Moscow was traditionally leading by the number of
questions. Quite unexpectedly, the Krasnodar territory is second, and the
Rostov and Moscow regions come third. Putin goes over most questions
personally.
Citizens will be able to put questions to the prime minister from the
studio, by telephone and during live-ins with Russian cities and villages.
This year, the residents of the village of Ivanino, the Vladimir region,
will be able to talk to Vladimir Putin. Last summer, Ivanino suffered from
wildfires. The Russian prime minister was the one who headed a campaign
against forest fires in the hot and dry summer of 2010. Putin talked to
the fire victims and personally monitored the construction of new homes
for them.
One of the live-ins will be with Astrakhan, the Volga region. Putin
went there in April 2010. He visited an oil platform, chaired a conference
on oil industry and saw a surgery unit of the regional clinical hospital.
Putin will also be able to talk to the people of Chita where he
stopped late in August when he was driving his yellow Lada Kalina Sport
car on the Amur highway.
The geography of Putin's "hot line" has always been vast. The
southernmost points were Botlikh in Dagestan, Grozny and Kaspiysk; the
northernmost locations were Murmansk and Vorkuta, the easternmost were
Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Khabarvosk and Vladivostok, and the westernmost were
Kaliningrad and Baltiysk.
People whom Putin met during his numerous trips across Russia will
join him in the studio on Thursday. They include doctors, teachers,
workers and servicemen.
"They are just ordinary people from regions whom Putin has already
met," Peskov explained.
Putin's Q & A session is expected to last for approximately two hours
but it's likely to be longer as usual. Putin broke record last year. He
answered 87 questions in more than four hours.
To ask your question, please call 8-800-200-40-40, send an SMS to
number 04040 or post it on the www.moskva-putin.ru website.

.Medvedev praises Moscow police for professional actions.

MOSCOW, December 16 (Itar-Tass) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev
has praised the Moscow police for its professionalism in preventing
violence in the capital on Wednesday, December 15.
"Yesterday, the Moscow police acted professionally. They need some
rest. You need it too. Good night," Medvedev wrote in his twitter in the
Internet on Thursday.
Viktor Biryukov, the press service chief of the Moscow Interior
Department, said the Moscow police had detained about 800 people in the
Russian capital on Wednesday, December 15, in a bid to thwart unlawful
actions. He said police had prevented clashes among groups of young people
and that the situation in Moscow was under control.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said police would harshly suppress any
manifestations of violence in Moscow streets. He also urged "hot heads"
not to yield to provocations.

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