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Months of infighting between Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev over Russia's budget ended on Monday - with Medvedev on top. At a meeting with senior government officials, the President announced a strikingly pessimistic set of spending priorities until 2012, based on conservative estimates suggesting that Russia will remain hampered by the economic crisis into next year and beyond...
...Putin's more optimistic forecasts, which some saw as an attempt to fend off political instability, "suffered a radical readjustment," wrote the daily Nezavisamaya Gazeta. "We all understand what a difficult situation our country, our economy, is in," Medvedev said as he announced that budget expenditures would exceed revenues for the first time in 10 years. He said the government would move "to a strict regime of saving budget resources" along the lines championed by bearish Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. (See pictures of Putin...
...Although Medvedev did not give a new estimate for the GDP decline in 2009, he said this year's budget deficit will be at least 7% of GDP - "and that's an optimistic forecast." On Friday, government figures for the first quarter showed the economy shrank at an annual rate of 9.5%, a radical revision after officials forecast in February that Russia's GDP would decline by only 2.2% this year. The International Monetary Fund has predicted that Russia's GDP could drop as much as 6% this year. "In 2009, unfortunately, we expect a sharper fall...
...Kudrin said that even a 5% budget deficit - lower than Medvedev's new prediction - would be enough to exhaust the government's $113 billion Reserve Fund, which is generated mostly through oil and gas export revenues. But he said that since the government is tightening spending and basing its budget on "conservative" oil price forecasts of $50 a barrel in 2010, $52 in 2011 and $53 in 2012, he believes the fund could begin replenishing itself as early as in 2011. Part of the reason for Russia's current predicament is earlier over-optimistic estimates for oil revenues, which make...
...leadership," he wrote. In fact, other experts suggest, such belligerent talk is meant more as a corrective threat than a potential course of action. But even if Moscow has no immediate designs on Crimea, the continued flow of baleful utterances from the Kremlin does reflect a desire for what Medvedev has called Russia's "privileged interests" in the region to be respected - in terms of politics, business and culture...