...Second President of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Because of constitutionally mandated term limits he is the current Prime Minister of Russia. His sock puppet, Dmitry Medvedev, was installed in the 2008 presidential elections. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law. During his eight years in office Russia's economy bounced back from crisis, seeing GDP increase, poverty decrease and average monthly salaries increase. During his presidency Putin passed into law a series of fundamental reforms, including a flat income tax of 13%, a reduced profits tax, and new land and legal codes. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile...front man said Monday the results of contested parliamentary polls will stand despite massive street protests and a probe by the election authorities.
Hey! Kabila said the same thing!
"Even if you add up all this so-called evidence, it accounts for just over 0.5 percent of the total number of votes," Putin's front man Dmitry Peskov told AFP in a telephone interview. "So even if hypothetically you recognise that they are being contested in court, then in any case, this can in no way affect the question of the vote's legitimacy or the overall results," Peskov said. His comments followed an order from President Dmitry Medvedev for election officials to look into reports of vote-fixing after the ruling party's narrow victory sparked the largest protest rallies since the 1990s. Saturday's historic demonstrations near the Kremlin saw more than 50,000 people deride the outcome of December 4 elections that were widely seen as a litmus test for Putin's planned return to the presidency next year.
The rallies have put Putin under the strongest political pressure he has faced in his dominant 12-year rule and suggested that his path back to the Kremlin in March elections may be thornier than originally thought. Putin himself stayed out of the public spotlight over the weekend and was scheduled on Monday to officially launch a new reactor at a nuclear power station in the central Russian region of Tver. But Medvedev on Sunday responded to the demonstrations by announcing the launch of an inquiry into the violation reports. "I disagree with the slogans and declarations made at the meetings," Medvedev wrote in his Facebook account. "Nevertheless, I have issued instructions to check all polling station reports about (failures) to follow election laws," Medvedev wrote.