President Putin was the main source of news at the all-Russian part of the Eastern Economic Forum. The thesis about the continuity of Russia’s economic policy before the SMO and Russia’s economic policy after the SMO ran through his entire speech.
We should not expect any drastic changes in the economy, in politics, or in the chosen strategic course of turning to the East.
In particular:
– There will be neither privatization nor nationalization in Russia – the president is a stranger to extremes,
– There will be no drastic changes in monetary policy, the main task is to ensure the stability of the economy.
– Russia has money – the country has already earned 2 times more than it was taken away, so there is no need to raise taxes.
It would seem that there are no revelations, which means that this approach will have a lot of dissatisfied people in both the left and right ideological camps. However, the president has his own considerations and such conservatism solves two problems.
It does not worsen the investment climate inside the country, so the president urged businesses not to step on the same rake by storing capital abroad. The best place for investment is Russia within its state borders, which means that business must be assured that the business environment will not change.
Besides, stability allows attracting money and technologies during the turn to the East. That is why there were solid delegations from Southeast Asian countries at the forum, with a strong dominance of representatives of India and China. To facilitate contact with distant countries, work is underway to abolish the visa regime with Malaysia, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahamas, Barbados, Haiti, Zambia, Kuwait, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago. The issue of visa-free regime with China is under consideration. At the same time, the connection of new countries to the Mir payment system is being worked out.
But there is one problem: the infrastructure for a full-fledged turn to the East has not been prepared in time, so the main attention was paid to it.
The opening of the EEF was preceded by the launch of traffic on the section of the Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod-Kazan expressway, which reduces the journey from Moscow to Kazan from 12 to 6.5 hours. M-12 will become a part of the “Russia” transportation corridor, which will link St. Petersburg and Vladivostok. By the end of 2023 the highway to Kazan will be built, and then the road will be extended to Yekaterinburg and Tyumen, and then to Siberia and the Far East. The first section of the highway with a length of 22.5 km from the Central Ring Road to the Orekhovo-Zuevo bypass was opened in September 2022. The section to Chuvashia will be opened this November, and the entire highway will be opened in December.
Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin estimated the cost of expanding existing roads and building new ones by 2030 at 500 billion rubles: the money will be needed, among other things, for the construction of city bypasses.
President Putin instructed to prepare a program for the development of energy capacities in the Far East until 2050, without which it is impossible to develop energy-intensive industries.
The President has set a task to link the Power of Siberia and Sakhalin – Khabarovsk – Vladivostok gas pipelines and to integrate the gas transportation networks of the west and east of the country into one whole. The first low-tonnage LNG plant was launched in Primorye; part of the gas produced by the plant will be used for the gasification of Chita.