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Post by Admin on Feb 17, 2019 21:19:43 GMT
Belarus is ready to merge with Russia, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko said on the third and last day of his bilateral talks with President Vladimir Putin on Friday. Rumors resurfaced this year that Russia could annex Belarus as Putin’s constitutional term limits bar him from running for the presidency in 2024. “The two of us could unite tomorrow, no problem,” Lukashenko said in a video shared by a Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid Kremlin reporter on Twitter Friday. “But are you – Russians and Belarussians – ready for it?” Lukashenko said as quoted by Interfax. “We’re ready to unite and consolidate our efforts, states and peoples as far as we’re ready.” Putin, meanwhile, stressed that “fully independent states simply do not exist in the world,” bringing the European Union as an example of interdependence.
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Post by Admin on Feb 19, 2019 17:20:26 GMT
Vladimir Putin has taken another step to boost his charisma by holding a wrestling session with members of Russia's national teams.
The training took place in a sports hall in St-Petersburg, with journalists and photographers watching on. Putin holds a black belt in Judo.
However, he did not just limit himself to the Japanese martial art. He showed off his skills from its Russian analogue Sambo and from Greek-Roman and freestyle wrestling.
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Post by Admin on May 30, 2019 18:13:32 GMT
The emerging notion that genetic security is part of national security is still unclear to most Russian citizens, but already it receives lavish funding. In late April, Russian authorities approved a budget of 220 billion rubles ($3.3 billion) in order to develop new genetic technologies over the next eight years. The document published on the government’s website says that the main purpose of the program is “to decrease critical dependence of Russian science on foreign genetic and biological databases” and on foreign specialized software and other technologies. But some see in the program the possibility to define Russian identity based on genetics. “I have never heard Putin or anybody else in the Kremlin mention the word ‘race,’” Svetlana Gannushkina, a senior human rights defender helping migrants told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “But once Putin said to me: ‘I agree we need migrants, but preferably well-educated Slavs of a fertile age.’” The state program aims to prevent and treat human diseases, although some Russian scientists still question whether gene editing is safe for people. “What is clear as daylight,” one of the participants in the program said privately, “is that gene editing is a gold mine, a very profitable business.” “There is a huge hype about genetic editing in Russia, mostly among billionaires,” pro-Kremlin political analyst Yuriy Krupnov told The Daily Beast earlier this month. “One procedure costs around $1 million abroad, so it sounds like a good business, but even if Russia develops its own technology, biological big data would require much bigger investments.” And speaking of big data, Russian policy makers now fret publicly about Russians handing over genetic data to foreign companies, such as commercial genealogy sites, to check out their ancestors. “There is a concern that Western secret services develop biological weapons, focusing on studying our DNA tests,” says Krupnov. The Kremlin has been worried about DNA studies of the Russian population for several years. “Putin wants to control Russian genes, genetic studies, just as much as he wants to control cyberspace,” a former member of the Russian parliament, Dmitry Gudkov, told The Daily Beast.
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Post by Admin on Oct 5, 2019 19:02:24 GMT
Norma Garca’s dream vacation, an extended jaunt with her adult daughter through erstwhile empires in Europe and the Middle East, was nearly dashed before it even began by Vladimir Putin’s machinery of state. The two Mexicans didn’t even need visas for France, and Garca quickly got the ones required for Turkey using her home computer in Aguascalientes. But for Russia, she had to hire a courier to hand-deliver their passports to the embassy in Mexico City, about 500 kilometers south, along with proof of prepaid airline tickets and hotel reservations. After a hand-wringing few weeks—and $160 in fees—they finally got their dark-green travel booklets back, freshly thickened with full-page stamps of approval. “My nerves were on edge because they just wouldn’t tell me what was happening with our passports,” Garca said in the lobby of the five-star Grand Hotel Europe in St. Petersburg one recent morning, as her excited daughter negotiated the day’s itinerary with their Russian guide. “It took a day for Turkey—one day!” If only the duo had waited just a little longer, Russia’s president would have made their visit to his hometown a whole lot easier, not to mention cheaper. On Oct. 1, this former czarist capital switched to a free, e-visa regime that includes a pledged 96-hour turnaround time for citizens of 53 countries. The rest of the Russian Federation, which stretches from the watery edges of Alaska and Japan to its nuclear-armed exclave inside the borders of the EU, will follow suit on Jan. 1, 2021, when a special app will make the process even simpler. The fee won’t exceed $50.
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Post by Admin on Nov 1, 2019 7:01:42 GMT
Last week, in a meeting with top advisors, Russian President Vladimir Putin lamented the population decline in the country’s Far East, saying it falls in an “alarming, red zone.” While this sparsely populated region, which shares a border with far more densely populated Chinese provinces, may raise particularly acute demographic concerns for the Kremlin, the country’s population decline more broadly—in both absolute and relative terms—is once again vexing the Russian leadership. Earlier this year the U.N. Commission on Population and Development concluded that the world’s population will grow from 7.7 billion in 2019 to 9.7 billion by 2050, an increase of some 26 percent; Russia, meanwhile, was projected to lose a little over 10 million people, shrinking by about 7 percent from 145.9 million in 2019 to 135.8 million in 2050, according to the U.N.’s World Population Prospects. Indeed, Russia’s population has dropped for the first time in a decade: According to World Bank data, this happened between 2017 and 2018 and the year-on-year drop was about 19,000; according to official Russian population statistics—which have been recalculated for 2015 and beyond to include the population of Crimea after its annexation from Ukraine—the drop happened between the start of 2018 and 2019 and was close to 100,000. While estimates of the country’s population vary from source to source (official national statistics place it at 146.8 million), the current downward trend is now undisputed. Its causes include a declining birth rate, a relatively high mortality rate and a drop in inbound migration.
Birth Rate
After more than 15 years of growth, Russia’s birth rate hit a plateau in the middle of this decade and began to decline in the past couple of years, according to the World Bank, steadily rising from 8.3 births per 1,000 people in 1999 to a high of 13.3 in 2014-2015, and down to 12.9 in 2016-2017 (the last year for which World Bank data are available). Although average birth rates have been declining worldwide for decades, domestic circumstances have compounded the trend in Russia. In the decade after the fall of the USSR in 1991, amid the socioeconomic collapse that followed, Russia’s birth rates declined steadily, while mortality rates spiked. As a result, the generation born in this period was much smaller than previous ones and these Russians have now hit prime childbearing age, leading to a secondary demographic dip. According to Tatyana Golikova, Russia’s deputy prime minister for social policy, the government’s ability to incentivize more active procreation, as it has tried to do in recent years, is now limited—both by the drop in the number of women of childbearing age (no more than 35 million by Golikova’s count) and by their having a first child later than before (ages 25-34), thus lowering the possibility of a second or third child.
Mortality Rate
While Russia’s overall mortality rate has remained relatively constant over the past few years, totaling 12.9-13 deaths per 1,000 people in 2015-2017 according to the World Bank, it remains high relative to most other former Soviet republics, BRICS countries and the West (follow the link above for comparative data), primarily due to a high incidence of vascular disease and cancer. Moreover, Russia’s death rates have been something of a rollercoaster in the post-Soviet period, spiking from 12.2 in 1992 to 15.7 in 1994, dipping as low as 13.5 in 1998 and then rising to 16-16.4 in 2003-2005, after which they declined steadily for a dozen years. The three-year period of 2013-2015 even saw positive natural population growth in Russia, when births exceeded deaths, per World Bank data. In her presentation to lawmakers earlier this year, Golikova also noted that death rates are far from uniform across the country, with 32 regions registering a rise in mortality rates in 2018. Some regions also have much higher rates than others. Officials from Russia’s federal statistics agency put Pskov and Tver regions at the top of the list with 17 deaths per 1,000 people, and Novgorod in second place at 16.5, while regions in the far north and the North Caucasus had the lowest rates, according to Gazeta.ru, from 4.2 in Chechnya and 4.8 in Dagestan to 8 each in Kabardino-Balkaria, Tyumen and Yakutia. The news outlet also quoted Golikova as saying that the death rate for rural Russians is 14 percent higher than among their urban counterparts, who live on average nearly two years longer.
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