Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, meets with Khabarovsk Governor Viktor Ishayev, right, in Sochi on September 25, 2006.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Vladimir Putin Comes to Khabarovsk in a Pipeline
Yesterday Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the governor of the Khabarovsk region, Viktor Ishayev, and was a witness to the difficult relationship between the governor and his mobile phone. Kommersant's special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov has the details.
The hotter it is in Sochi, the more insistently the governors want to speak with Vladimir Putin concerning preparations for winter. Mr. Putin, however, is understandably loathe to throw himself into their problems when the thermometer stands at 27 degrees Celsius and there is not a cloud in the sky.
"Our first and most important task is to prepare for winter," said the governor.
"How are the preparations going?" asked the president.
"Preparations are ongoing," answered the governor, using the usual flawless, universal method of talking with the president - answering him in his own words.
"At our last meeting, I asked you for help in completing the construction of a gas pipeline [from Sakhalin to Komsomolsk and on to Khabarovsk]," said the governor.
"At our last meeting, and at the one before that," sighed the president.
From there, the two went on to discuss the completion of the gas pipe before October, when houses will start to need heating. President Putin reminded the governor, "in general in the country as a whole and in the federal territories of the Russian Federation, we need to think about the energy balance. It is not possible to hang everything only on gas, even from the point of view of security."
Mr. Putin's concerns about making the Khabarovsk region entirely dependent on gas seemed strange in conjunction with his complete lack of qualms about making the entirety of Europe dependent on Russian gas.
"We need various sources of energy [besides gas]," continued Mr. Putin. "…You should remember that in accordance with current law we have only one export window: the company Gazprom. So that neither shareholders, nor other interested parties are tempted to consider [the gas] as being for internal use, we send it abroad."
The conversation moved through a discussion of plans to build an aluminum plant in the Khabarovsk region and then touched on the "Sakhalin-1" project that is being constructed in the Primorsky region with the participation of Rosneft. The oil terminal there will move 12 million tons of oil a year. Ishayev assured the president that all ecological safeguards and precautions were being observed.
Besides oil and ecology, the governor wanted to talk to Mr. Putin about churches. He showed the president a photo album containing snapshots of a church and claimed to have opened the first Orthodox seminary in the Far East in the Khabarovsk region.
Mr. Putin, however, shot the governor a sharp question about housing for veterans, which the governor fielded admirably – "everyone, one hundred percent, are assured of housing!" – just as a cell phone went off loudly in the room. The governor was so carried away by his discussion of the number of computers owned by people in the Khabarovsk region that he at first failed to understand whose cell phone it was. He glared at the assembled journalists and even at Mr. Putin himself before finally figuring out that the noise was coming from the pocket of his suit coat. He pulled out the phone and, before Mr. Putin could say a word, started feverishly pressing buttons.
This embarrassing scene went on for a while – it was clear from the way he held the phone under the table and continuously jabbed at the buttons that he was sending an sms, and a long one at that – before Mr. Putin finally managed to ask, "And how are your roads?"
"In the last few years we have built 1700 kilometers of roads," said the governor, returning to earth and the conversation. "In the best of the 'Period of Stagnation' [the 1970s era of torpor under Brezhnev] less was built than what we have achieved in recent years."
It was clear that those years of stagnation were and will remain the governor's best.
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 26, 2006
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