Social media and a live studio audience. Translator welcome, mr. Putin. Welcome. Over there, please. Hello, mr. Putin. [ applause ] a million and a half questions is how many weve had this morning we reached that mark. The most popular way of contacting us here is a phone call. Every phone call is recorded by an operator. Almost 400,000 texts and messages. But this year russians are using a very special app to ask their questions. You can even record a video call, send a text message. Its very simple. Press record. The only limit is you only have one limit and then you press send. Your message will be processed here. We will receive it, certainly. Of course, theres an advantage to a video call. You can actually show what kind of problem you have, like a road or maybe a landfill or maybe a leaking roof. So the most topical and interesting questions well be answering today. Another way to contact us is to use our live platform. You might even go live. Every call, every message is not left unattended. We process everything. And after we finish well continue working with these calls and messages. Hello, mr. Putin. Shall we begin . Translator good morning, sure. Translator in the last few days we had several reports of how youve been preparing for the direct line. Youve been sitting with heaps of paper and looking at your laptop. What kind of your again questions do we have now . Translator i need to be aware of whats happening. And i know one of the most pressing issues for people in any case but so when we get prepared for the direct line, as we know its just one of the most prominent and pronounced issues. Right now its no secret that our Living Standards, income, health care and what i just heard landfills, garbage, recycling. Translator yes. Weve had a lot of questions concerning these topics. But heres another thing. As far as i understand there are National Projects aimed at resolving these issues. Officials always talk about them. But judging by the questions people dont really understand what these National Projects are about. Are they going to help . Translator yeah, sure. They are supposed to help and thank you for this queue. This is what we focus on. Definitely our biggest focus is our people but in order to improve our economy, in order to help our people, we decided to channel our activities into National Projects. And the ultimate goal is to transform our economy, to make it a hitech one to boost Labor Productivity and then based on this improve our Living Standards and provide security for russia, for the long term. This is why we split all of our activities but not just by the level of importance, just in terms of subject matter, in terms of how resources are distributed. We work hard to do that and we first we needed to identify sources of financing for the activities. One of the sources of financing by the government and one of the ways was to increase the vat tax from 18 to 20 to zero. We need to build infrastructure. Who is going build railroads or bridges or highways . Thats the job of the government. Access to electricity, access to the power grids. You cant do that without the government. Then we did other calculations. We wanted to give a boost to Certain Industries and we wanted to boost the incomes of our people. This is why we had to do that, we had to rely had to resort to these not very popular measures. Overall the government and the central bank have proved right, but inflation was up for six months. It means that the central bank had to hike up the, keep policy rates, Industrial Production was a little bit down but now we see effects has faded and inflation is down, just got the data the day before yesterday. Its below 5 . Industrial output is on the rise. And income is on the rise. So for the time being, the way we planned it, it actually works. Translator mr. Putin, so lets continue. The income is falling, weve all witnessed it. We have so many questions about it, and im just going to ask you a few from different regions. When is life going to improve . We only have 10,000 rubblels. Towns are dying. Young people are leaving. I know before we begun we had a video call. Please call center, the floor is yours. Well people are struggling. They have no money to buy basic needs and necessities, food, clothes, and People Struggle technology most are teachers and doctors. A good specialist from ural said shes getting a salary of 10,000 rubles and teachers in other regions are getting 15,000 or 20. Heres a video call from a fireworker. Hello, mr. Putin. Please tell me when is our salary going up . Right now what we get monthly is from 12 to 13,000 rubles. Im the head of my division so im getting 16,000 rubles. Well, its impossible to live getting this money, and we have to work two, three jobs and our families are falling apart. We only have two, three people on duty and you can see whats happening in our country. Country houses are burning, forests. So when is it going to change . Translator referring to your questioning on 10,000 rubles, we need to look into it. For the first time in history we took a decision to bring the minimum wage to 11,000 rubles, actually 11,280 rubles. So its actually not possible to pay a person less. Well 10,000 thats the basic salary and the rest is bonuses. Translator some people say regional authorities made those decisions. Translator we need someone to look into it. People that monitor the situation. To look into it. Maybe work halftime, flexitime. Now inseed the situation is not the best one. You have officer i mean, are you and officer . You are supposed to get 43,000 rubles and those that are not officers will get 16,000 or 13,000. But in the past month weve been talking about it with the minister of emergencies. We have decided to earmark 4. 3 billion rubles to raise pay for workers of the Emergency Ministry to 24,000 rubles. Also adjust their pay next year. Weve added 8 billion rubles, and the pay should grow to 32 rubles. Translator lets go back to the economy, many believe that the sanctions are to blame and today the eu is extending the sanctions and people are urging us to make up. So lets assume that russia agrees to this. Will it help . Translator well, we do not have any disputes with anyone. And will it yield anything or are we missing out on something . According to experts, these sanction sanctions cost russia about 50 billion u. S. Dollars. But the European Union lost about 240 billion. The u. S. Lost 17 billion. Japan lost 27 billion. Again that affects jobs in those countries, they are losing our markets. Thats hit them hard. Again these are preliminary figures. Okay. We agree with that. But we had some advantages. There was a virtualsilver linin. We had to switch on our brings in. What we do in the hitech part of the economy. Import Substitution Program was launched. Thats worth 667 billion rubles. That forced us to develop certain areas where we never had any skills, take russia as part of the soviet union and modern russia. We never had any domestic ship engines. We used to buy them from abroad. But we realized its not just enou enough. These engines are a particular area where were not qualified and were able to fill in the demand and we now have special ship engines which are, have the same quality of foreign engines. Take energy machinery. Take other areas. Imagine ten years ago and imagine they would tell you that we would export Agricultural Products worth 25. 7 billion u. S. Dollars. We would laugh that person in the face. Shake his hand and say thank you for your fantasies but this is not possible, not feasible. But thats what we have today. 25. 7 billion. By 2024 we want to go to 45 billion. Can we reach that . Thats a question. We believe thats quite realistic and we need go for that figure. And that helps us to mobilize resources. We got our act together. We can surrender. We can give up. We can give away our national interests. But will there be any change . We might have some signals but there wont be any drastic change. Take china. China has nothing to do with crimea or the conflict in southeast ukraine. Were accused that we are occupied. Thats complete nonsense. Thats a lie. What about china . Has nothing to do with it. The u. S. Slapped tariffs on their goods. You can call it sanctions, tariffs, sanction, same way. What about the attack against huawei. The hitech giant. What do they want to do . They want to curb the development, the rise of china. That is a competitor of the u. S. The same is happening in the case of russia and it will continue to happen. So if we are to have a certain place in this world, we just need be stronger particularly in the economy. Translator but still many are saying its time to end this. Translator well no one likes sanctions. We launched 50 billion and the eu lost 240 billion. And that has an impact on many sectors of the economy in europe. Definitely, as i said, theres been certain advantages and my personal opinion is that its better to leave under normal Economic Conditions and to have common rules, feasible rules. Translator so a if you questio few questions, mr. Putin all ukrainians can get easy citizenship. Will we restore relationships with ukraine. Will you come to ukraine. We have a live video call from kiev, a journalist. Good afternoon. Mr. Putin, good afternoon. What are the prospects for negotiations in minsk Program Platform . Mr. Medvedev said that he will conduct negotiations directly regardless of the position of the new power in kiev. So as for prisoners and their release, what do you have to say about that . Translator well, we always keep track of these issues. Again, these are humanitarian issues. People have found themselves in a very difficult situation. They end up in jails or in similar institutions that are no better than jails. Youve dealt with it. It all started actually with the instruction by mr. Polyshenko. You take it to heart and just recently raised tissue of releasing Ukrainian Naval workers, ukrainian seamen that were captured near the straits and some other ukrainians that are serving time here in russia. These issues have to be resolved in a comprehensive way. We need to think of the, of the fate of the people who we really care about and these are russians who have ended up in the same situation in the ukraine. Im sorry for interrupting you. I saw one question on the screen. When will we bridge over. The government has to resolve this issue with the governments. Ate costly project and, again, where does this road lead to . Theres nowhere to lead that road further on. Its like a dead end. This is why the payback period will never happen. But sooner or later this issue will have to be resolved so it could develop further. Now heres another question. What about the ethnic group. Just assimilated, i guess. Undergone acie m assimilation. We used to have groups that lived in russia. We still have some ethnic groups that have kept the land, some have disappeared but they are all part of our cultural dna. Translator gloe translator lets go back to our question. I want to know about the economy. Are we going to further into a market economy, going to be administered by a demand economy or going continue the way we are going now which is stagnation . Translator so economists say theres not going be any break through. We dont have any economists from 1990s. Mr. Kudron, maybe. Maybe partially related to the 1990s. But hes transformed himself. Hes drifting towards the economic stance that was promoted. Wants to use our oil reserves and thats so that we have more oil revenues spent, but theres opponents who say that would trigger inflation. Okay, let the debate go on. We dont have actually any economists from 1990s. Theres some Monetary Policy ideas maybe from the 1990s but we dont have an Economic System from the 1990s. Judge . We dont that have galloping inflation of 30 . We dont have the debt that we had back then. We do depend on the imf. So weve gone higher than 500 billion u. S. Dollars. We dont have debt. We do have incidents when payments are not made to the population. But we dont have situations that we saw in the 1990s. The military didnt get their pay for six months and only pension payments were the only one, only way to allow it to go and sometimes people didnt get their retirement benefits. Well actually a different story. You cant have a pure market economy or a pure command system, but a blended economy, thats what we see around the world. Once you start once you see any disruptions, any issues in the economy, then the role of the state goes up. Ones household get wealthier and things calm down, the state gets away from the economy. Thats what happened across the world, thats what we saw during crises. Take a blended economic models. Take china. They are developing faster than the world average. Possibly india. China is seeing slower pace of Economic Growth than india, but still is one of the Drivers Behind the word. Take western dem ok sichltsy sy. They push for Strategic Planning in certain industry. They zroent anything against that. So we need to be aware of that. We need to use that fully. We discussed that earlier with Economic Development ministry. The most important thing is motivation. Regardless of where you are, a command economy, you need to have the right motivation. This is the only way to resolve the issues that the country is facing. Moving on. Thank you. We are currently at the Technical Center of our program here. The technical heart of the direct line q a session is beating. Its very noisy here. People have a lot of work. These people are processing all the calls and messages from the social media. You can see how many people are waiting for their opportunity to ask a question to the president , and here you can see the governors waiting. Some of them may have to answer to the president today. They might be nervous. And so what screen is this . This is from st. Petersburg. This is from magadan. Lets go to magadan. Go magadan. Its live. Mr. Putin, good afternoon. My name is and my question is in the media russian people are often told that some corrupt official has been caught. They have had truck loelloads o money. So could he have acquired all this money without outside help . You are told about sources of financing. Where do these billions of rubles come from, millions of dollars come from . Who is responsible for raging corruption in our country . Do you feel personally responsible for the outrage thats happening . First of all, i do feel personally responsible. Its a responsibility for it. If i didnt feel responsibility, you wouldnt see any media reports. Just like it happened in other countries. Just like what happened here in russia. There is always an alternative, and i am told, okay, can we hushhush it . Can we cover it up because there will be questions like yours. And i have just one reply to that. No. If there is a cry, if there is corruption, if someone wants it to get the expense of other people, we have to take a criminal investigation to the end. We need to do it in a transparent way. Where do they take the money . Again, these are corruption schemes. They get money from the business community. And usually both sides are responsible. Some people steal and some take. They have people who pay bribes and there are people who take bribes. Where will this money go . The government will take care of the money. Public officials and Law Enforcement officers are always sayi seeing a sudden position, a special position, and their special responsibility. When you found out about those billions, how did you respond . What did you say . Sometimes, you know, youd rather not use those words in public when you get the news of billions. You are speechless. At least no proper words for it. No words without obscenities. But, again, we need to fight this evil. We are aware of the issue. You can see similar incidents in other countries. Take the u. S. There are corrupt officials who get 100, 150 years in jail. It doesnt make sense, but thats tough and thats done in a public way. Well do the same here in russia. By the way, they are talking about punishment, life sentences. Well, if its a person who is 60 plus, well, you can give them a life sentence, but the difference there is a little difference. There is a feeling that the authorities are ramping up the fight against corruption, but its not just about the size of or the amount, but its just that it should be inevitable. Punishment should be inevitable. You seem to be ramping up the fight against corruption. Seems like corruption is on the rise . No. You say it seems. It only seems to you. The number of corruption crimes is going down. Its going down thanks to our consistent uncompromising approach. We will continue to do that further. Another blogger has joined us. Well known in the russian blogosphere as goblin. So you have the floor. So your question is, if i understood it correctly, is about the fake news. Good afternoon, mr. Putin. My name is dmitrory push could have. The growth of the International Media has destroyed many of the barriers that prevent the spread of fake news, but now anyone can just spout some nonsense and it is spread in a moment. We always face some fake news, and our people is rather naive and believes. Young people on the internet believe things they are told and say on the internet. Of i know for sure. I have read it online. And on the west, on the other hand, there is actual criminal responsibility, criminal liability for spreading fake news. For example, in iceland. So maybe we should do the same and introduce tighter responsibility for spreading fake news. We have never had any responsibility, actually. We just introduced the ministry of responsibility. But it is a nation. Its becoming increasingly acute. You mentioned the incident. There are other incidents while we were preparing for the event, and we were sitting in my office. Even the heads of our main channels, channel 1 and channel 2, they are getting calls about bombs planted. But its not just about our media. Its not just calls. We are getting other kinds of information. This information is spread, is received by shopping malls, by companies that operate buses or trains, and that inflicts serious material damage, and that might cause concern for these communities in general. They say there is radiation levels that are going up. There have been fake ne