democratic and fiercely defended Russia’s energy policies, while expressing interest in proposals for an international natural gas cartel. Addressing an annual Kremlin press conference, Putin repeated that he would step down in 2008 at the end of his second term, as required under the constitution.
He insisted his replacement would be democratically elected in a March 2, 2008 poll, saying: “There won’t be a chosen successor — there will be candidates.”
“The authorities’ task is to ensure the democratic character of the elections ... so that citizens can make their choice,” he said.
Putin, who has been widely accused of rolling back democracy in Russia since taking over the Kremlin in 2000, refused to say whom he would like to see as his replacement. Many analysts believe that Putin’s endorsement will be decisive.
Speaking for three-and-a-half hours before more than 1,000 Russian and foreign journalists, Putin, 54, also used the event to defend Moscow’s energy policies and for the first time to suggest support for a natural gas cartel.
Russia, the world’s leading gas producer and number two oil exporter, has been accused by energy-importing Western countries of using those vast resources as a political tool.
However, Putin insisted that Russia was a reliable partner and said that recent price hikes for energy sold to Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine and other former Soviet republics were not politically motivated.
“We are always told that Russia is using its... economic resources to achieve foreign policy aims. That is not the case.”
He suggested that Russia, which controls a third of the world’s natural gas reserves, could join Iran and other major producers in forming an organization similar to the oil cartel OPEC.
“A gas OPEC is an interesting idea. We’re going to think about it,” Putin said.
While Putin added that he did not mean a “cartel,” the Saudi-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meets regularly to set production quotas, which influence world prices.
A “gas OPEC” would aim to “coordinate our activities, bearing in mind how to solve the main problem — secure a reliable supply of energy resources to the main consumers,” he said.
The marathon press conference gave Putin a chance to combat an avalanche of negative news over the last 12 months and to tout his successes ahead of parliamentary elections in December and the subsequent presidential election.
Putin said the main achievements of his two four year terms were crushing the Chechen separatist rebellion and reinvigorating the country’s decrepit post-Soviet economy.
“We managed together to restore the territorial integrity of the country, to strengthen the political system and to achieve the needed rate of growth in the Russian economy,” he said.
Putin underlined that inflation had for “the first time” been brought below double digits in 2006, that foreign debts had been paid off, and that last year “an unprecedented” 41 billion dollars (31.5 billion euros) of private capital flowed into Russia — 30 billion dollars of it in foreign direct investment.
However, he added that closing the country’s yawning income gap remained a major task.
Among the most sensitive topics Putin addressed were the shocking and mysterious murders in 2006 of two outspoken political opponents — investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and fugitive former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko.
Politkovskaya was the 13th journalist believed to have been murdered for her work since Putin took power in 2000, while Litvinenko accused the Russian leader of ordering his fatal radiation poisoning, a charge the Kremlin has angrily rejected.
Putin said that “persecution of journalists is one of the most serious problems and we recognize the degree of our responsibility for that.” He promised to do “everything to defend” the press.
However on Litvinenko, he belittled the former security service officer’s importance and said that courts would have to decide who was guilty for his death in London last November.
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