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Interview on Ukrainian Television Channels UT-1, Inter and 1 6 October 27, 2004 Kiev, Ukraine Интервью украинским телеканалам «УТ-1», «Интер» и «1 1» 26 октября 2004 года Киев I do agree with you however, and I will discuss with my colleagues how to bring order to this situation. But we need order to be brought in such a way that the vast majority of honest people in Ukraine and Russia do not suffer. The list of documents accepted at the moment there are five of them, diplomatic passports, service passports, foreign travel passports and so on should be extended to include internal passports. In other words, Ukrainian citizens should be able to use their internal passports to enter the Russian Federation unhindered. Upon my return I will issue the relevant instructions to the Interior Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the Presidential Executive Office. So I hope that our discussion today will have positive results both for you and for many other Ukrainian and Russian citizens who travel to each other on business and in order to maintain family : The telephone center is continuing its work. We are being swamped by calls around 600 calls a minute, a very impressive now have a call from Ternopol Oblast, but we are getting calls from every part of the , dont give up, keep calling and you might get the chance to talk directly with the Russian , go ahead. Hello, can you hear us? Please introduce : Good evening. My name is Galina Dolgela and I am calling from the town of Zaleschiki in Ternopol Oblast. I worked in the town of Salekhard for 20 years and I receive a quarterly additional payment to my pension from the Russian Federation, but for some reason my pension payments are always delayed. Why is Russia not paying pension top-ups to those who spent many years working in the Far North? Thank you. VLADIMIR PUTIN: Concerning delays in pension payments, that is, of course, a sad situation. I will definitely signal this matter to the ministries responsible for this area. As far as I know, we now have only minimum cases of delayed pension payments in for pension payments for those who worked in the Far North and regions with similar benefits, there is still work to be done on bringing order to the Russian legislation in this area. For example, people who worked in the Far North, in the conditions of the Far North, are entitled to certain benefits, but these benefits cease to be paid if people leave these regions, and this is as if pushing them to go back to the Far North. This is a wrong decision and this situation needs to be questions keep coming in to the telephone centre. At the beginning of the broadcast there were about 80,000, and now this figure is constantly increasing. I can only say one thing, not one of your questions is ignored. All these questions were processed by our operators over the last few days, and the most frequently asked questions were given to Russian President Vladimir Putin before the broadcast Vladimirovich, were you able to look at any of them? You have already said that you really did look at these questions? Which of them caught your attention most of all? :Yes, I took a number of them. I dont know, we still have time, dont we? Aleksandr Evgenevich Fadeev: Why is it beneficial for Ukraine to cooperate more closely with Russia, what benefits can western de-industrialised regions of Ukraine receive from this? Why is it beneficial for Ukraine to cooperate with Russia? I think that this is more or less obvious. Our corporative ties have been very closely developed since Soviet times. Several of our factories, Russian and Ukrainian, cannot exist without one another. Without Russian-Ukrainian cooperation, some factories would simply stop functioning. This is the first , by combining efforts, especially in the research and development sphere, in the high-technology sphere, we can confidently conquer markets of third-party countries, which would have been very difficult to do for such regions of Ukraine where agriculture, for example, dominates, Russia of course represents for them a good market for selling Ivanovich Synokoev: Dear Mr. President. I am a citizen of Ukraine, I respect this country and its people, but still in my heart I consider myself a citizen of the country where I was born, went to school, and served in the army, whose language I speak, where my relatives, friends and colleagues live, a country which, without asking me, or millions of other people like myself, was torn up into small independent countries. I want to live in a large orderly country, where there is one honest, strong President, one language, and where all peoples are friends.
