Putin presses Medvedev on implementation of policy decrees

(Interfax – May 23, 2013) Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev to work out and confirm a plan for the federal executive authorities’ work, aimed at fulfilling the presidential policy decrees signed by Putin at the start of his third presidential term in May 2012, privately-owned Interfax news agency reported on 23 May.

Five-year plan

The plan should be drawn up for the next five years, with a breakdown by year.

“Take measures for ensuring public transparency of the plans for the work of the federal executive authorities and relevant information about the actual results of their implementation,” it says in the instruction.

Medvedev has also been instructed to provide revised plans for the work of the federal executive authorities. The deadline for implementing the instruction is 7 June 2013.

Putin criticized government ministers at a meeting on 7 May for failing to carry out the policy decrees.

Reaction to Putin’s instruction

Political analyst Aleksandr Kynev told heavyweight liberal newspaper Kommersant that the development of such a plan by the government “is comparable to the drawing up of the schedule for their own dismissals”.

“From a bureaucratic point of view, this task looks like mockery,” Kynev said. “The president’s May decrees are themselves unfulfillable – how is it possible to draw up a plan to fulfil the unfulfillable.”

He said that Putin’s instruction is part of the “current trend for the systemic weakening of Medvedev’s group”. “This is the departure of (former) Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov (who resigned earlier in May) and the information campaign against Deputy Prime Minister Arkadiy Dvorkovich, the constant criticism of members of the government – and it is a matter of its key figures”.

Konstantin Merzlikin, secretary of the political council of the RPR-Parnas liberal opposition party, said that Putin’s new instruction is “another humiliation” of Dmitriy Medvedev but “completely in the spirit of the mutual relations between President Putin and Medvedev’s government”.

As for the possibility of implementing the instructions in such a short time, Merzlikin said that “it is possible for the staff to draft a document in five minutes, but it will be the same as when Surkov reported to the president”. He was referring to the stinging criticism Surkov received from Putin over the failure to implement his decrees at the government meeting on 7 May.

“Or it is possible to assemble a government commission on legislation, involve experts, the public and to create a serious document, according to which it is possible to progress substantially,” he said.

For his part, co-chairman of the RPR-Parnas liberal opposition party Mikhail Kasyanov said that “everything is leading to the fact that it is very likely that (former Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister) Aleksey Kudrin will become prime minister as early as the autumn”.