In early May, one year into his last consecutive term as president, Vladimir Putin summoned four dozen officials from across Russia to the Grand Kremlin Palace for a televised progress report on the central pledge of his re-election campaign.
With a budget of almost $400bn over six years, Putin was eager to find out how the country’s most ambitious effort to raise living standards since the Soviet era was coming along.
Dubbed National Projects, the spending programme established very specific targets to hit by 2024 in categories ranging from social services and infrastructure to technology and ecology.
For an hour and a …read more
Source: Gulf times
