Word: russian
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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...
...Medvedev is clearly listening to Kudrin here, suggesting that the government will become much more austere in its spending," said Alexie Moisseev, a chief analyst at Renaissance Capital, a leading investment bank in Moscow. "Maybe this time around the Russian government will become more conservative and balance its budget in a more proactive way." (Read: "Putin to the West: Hands Off Ukraine...
...TIME's photos of the Russian Czars...
...Kremlin certainly has plenty of levers to pull in Ukraine to make its views felt, with its control over gas supplies, alongside the popularity of Russian state-controlled TV in the east and south of the country, where pro-Russian sentiment is strongest. "In certain sections of the Ukrainian political and business élite, there are links with Russia stretching back to Soviet times," says Paliy from the Institute of Foreign Policy. "There are also a large number of Russian-sponsored think tanks in Ukraine, which function freely and push the Kremlin's views...
...Russian leadership learnt one important lesson from 2004 - not to put all their eggs in one basket," says Trenin. Meanwhile, Russians and Ukrainians alike will be watching for Putin's next trenchant explanation from literary history...