Putin tries to pack poll punch
Russian President stages visit to voter’s rundown home in the Urals
In a stage-managed gesture of benevolence a year ahead of presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin flew 1,200 km to call in on a woman living in squalor and ordered her to be rehoused immediately.
Putin’s carefully-choreographed trip to the woman’s Uralshome with state media on hand to cover is part of a pre-election Kremlin drive to project the image of a caringleader as poverty rises nationwide and the economy slows.
Putin is expected to seek another term next March and though he is all but certain to be re-elected by a landslide, he has shown he is eager to address mounting social grievances across his vast nation of 146 million.
Anastasia Votintseva had complained to the Kremlin leader during a televised question-andanswer session this month that she had to live in unsanitary conditions in a ramshackle wooden house. She said she was afraid the ceiling would one day collapse onto her children.
Putin, live on air, promised at the time topersonally visit her and help solve her problem. He made good on his promise on Tuesday dropping in on Votintseva and her neighbours, who live in a rickety, barracks-style twostorey house in the Urals mountain city ofIzhevsk.
Putin’s visit was timed to coincide with the woman’s 27th birthday. “I haven’t come empty-handed here,” the main Russian TV channels showed Putin telling Votintseva. “There is also a present, simple but good. This is a trip toSochi,” he said to an applause by her neighbours handing Votintseva a holiday certificate for her and her children to visit Russia’s Black Sea resort.
“You’re my best present,” she told him with tears ofgratitude. Votintseva, who shares a tiny apartment with her three children and a sister, said she had been due to be given newhousing only in 2029. “Rehouse them by the end of this year,” Putin told the acting regional governor, Alexander Brechalov, in remarks shown by some news programmes.
In another case that won public’s attention, a young woman from the Arctic region of Murmansk complained to Putin during his live phone-in that she had developed an advanced case ofcancer after being misdiagnosed in a local hospital. State-controlled media later gave blanket coverage to a special operation by Russia’s emergencies ministry, which sent aflying hospital to evacuate the woman for treatment to one of Moscow’s best oncological centres.