Academic literature on the topic 'Russia (Federation). President (1999-2008 : Putin)'

Legal-political changes in the Russian Federation during the first presidency of Vladimir Putin, covering the years 2000-2008, are the subject of the article. The study first focuses on the strengthening of executive power, both at the central and regional levels, consolidating the power camp and shaping the political system of the state. In the period under analysis, the powers of the President of the Russian Federation were increased, the Federation Council was weakened, control over the regions was strengthened, and a number of rights and freedoms of citizens were limited. In his actions, Putin relied on the power ministries and secured the loyalty of the State Duma and the oligarchs. The United Russia party became his political base. Putin’s political opponents and competitors were ruthlessly eliminated from political life. An analysis of the features of the political system of the Russian Federation indicates that it had become an authoritarian state.

AbstractIn the present article, it is assumed that V.V. Putin will not have the 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation changed in order to help him arrange for a prolonged stay as President of Russia after his second term expires in 2008. It is also assumed that there will be no constitutional changes as to the power and the position of the prime-minister which would allow for an immediate 'return' of V.V. Putin in another capacity, namely as prime-minister, with much the same powers as he presently holds as President. The author expects that Putin will be true to his word in that he will maintain the 1993 Constitution (with the exception of minor change), that he will show to be—to use the Russian constitutional terminology—the garant of this Constitution.Nevertheless, within the framework of the 1993 Constitution, substantial changes have been made in the ordering of the Russian state, by federal law, by other means. The subordination of the subjects of the Russian Federation to the federal center, the 'emancipation' of state-politics from party politics, the 'emancipation' of democracy itself from party-politics, the penetration of societal organizations by state institutions (upravliaemaia demokratiia or suverennaia demokratiia), and the accompanying (state-) ideological changes, which have come about especially during Putin's second term, all add up to what is expected to be a lasting legacy. Putin has not changed the 1993 Constitution; he has given it its definite reading (interpretation) as it were.

In contrast to his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Russia's President Vladimir Putin continues to successfully neutralize legislative opposition and push his reform agenda through the State Duma. His success is due in large part to the transformation of the party system during the 1999 electoral cycle. In the face of a less polarized and fragmented party system, the Kremlin-backed party of power, Unity, became the foundation for a stable majority coalition in parliament and a weapon in the political battle to eliminate threatening opponents such as Yuri Luzhkov's Fatherland-All Russia and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.

The Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic declared itself sovereign in 1990 but did not replace the 1978 constitution until 1994. Already in 1996, under the new President Lukashenko, a constitutional reform followed which provided for a strong concentration of power in the hands of the president and largely abolished the separation of powers. In 1999, the foundations were laid for a Union State consisting of the Russian Federation and Belarus. However, the Union State remained strongly underdeveloped for a long time. Russia did not want to transfer sovereign rights and Belarus defended its national sovereignty. It was not until 2019 that Russia ultimately demanded deeper integration of the two states, also to help Vladimir Putin as President of the Union State to extend his term in office. Belarus knew how to resist this approach. After the rigged presidential elections in Belarus in 2020 and the suppression of civil protests, Belarus became completely dependent on political decisions in Moscow. The concept of the Union State revived in the form of 28 union programmes with profound harmonisations in the economic sphere. Deepened military cooperation with Russia and Belarus' participation in the war in Ukraine brought the country further and further under Moscow's power. Belarus lost national sovereignty in no small measure.

The article is devoted to both the «eternal» and the actual problem of poverty which actually reflects the development of any state. The relevance and the urgency of this matter are predetermined by the decree of the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin dated May 7, 2018 «On the National Goals and Strategic Objectives of the Russian Federation for the Period until 2024» [Decree of the President of the Russian Federation, from May 7, 2018 No. 204 «On the National Goals and Strategic Objectives Development of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2024», 2018, 1]. According to the document, the key tasks for the coming years are reducing poverty by half, ensuring the growth of the welfare of citizens which should be reflected in the national project developed by the Government of the Russian Federation.Implementation of these tasks is rather complicated by the fact that in the current Russian practice only a monetary approach to determining the level of poverty is used, which does not reflect the characteristics, causes, factors of poverty of a particular group of the population; the adopted methodology for calculating poverty does not fully take into account the real situation of citizens. Solving the problem is limited only to raising incomes to the subsistence minimum as well as to the payment of various types of social benefits.In this regard, it is important to identify and apply social indicators that are based on a comprehensive account of the accumulated wealth of science approaches to poverty assessment.Object. Population unable to meet the minimum basic needs.Subject. Features of poverty in modern Russia.Aim. Identification of social indicators to manage inequalities.The Main Theoretical Provisions of the Article. Poverty exists in any society, characterized by inconsistency, diversity. In scientific practice, there are three main theoretical and methodological approaches to measuring poverty: absolute, relative and subjective. Due to several concepts being known, there are different estimates of poverty. In this regard, a number of social indicators to characterize the individual sides of the level of welfare of the population have been determined.

The focus of this paper is based on the analysis of bilateral relations between Federal Republic Germany and the Russian Federation in the period from 2000 to 2017. Until November 2005, the German Government was led by Social Democratic party leader Gerhard Schroeder. After the triumph, the Christian Democrats at extraordinary parliamentary elections that were held in September the same year the rudder of the government is in hands of Angela Merkel until the present. Vladimir Putin largely determines main directions of Russian politics and represents a dominant political figure since the beginning of his first mandate as the Russian Federation President. These three political leaders have mostly dictated bilateral relations dynamics between FR Germany, as an economic leader in Europe, and the Russian Federation as the biggest country in the world. Germany settles its needs for energy and vital resources mostly from Russia, while the great importance is paid to the import of the German technologies and capital by the Russian side in order to diversify its economy and ceased to be an economy based on the export of the national resources. Unlike most of the growing economies, Germany's relations with the Russian Federation overcomes the capacity of the economy and relates to political and security aspects. The peak of the German-Russian relations had been achieved in 2008 by the project Partnership in modernization. The European Union attempted in 2010 to establish a similar partnership with Russia following the same model. The Ukrainian conflict eruption in 2014 and introduction of sanction to Russian Federation by EU, as well as counter-measures undertaken in opposite direction, has frozen, at least until the moment of the Ukrainian conflict settlement, the possibility for further development of German-Russian relations and partnership agenda between EU and RF.

The year 2024 has been declared by the head of state, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, the Year of the Family. As stated in the presidential decree, the decision was made in order to popularize state policy in the field of family protection and traditional values. It should be noted that in the XXI century in Russia, the Year of the Family was announced twice — in 2008 and in 2024. This indicates the special attention paid by the country’s leadership, political and State institutions and civil society institutions to this topic. In the Russian Federation, many government programs aimed at strengthening the institution of the family have been developed, created and implemented recently. And there are many reasons for this, including those that, unfortunately, are far from optimistic. Russia as a state and Russian society is faced with a number of social problems that threaten many of the established foundations, values, and the future of the country. As never before in the modern history of Russia, issues of social security are coming to the fore. Real threats loomed over the most important social institution — the family. In our state, the family is protected at the highest constitutional level. Article 38 of the basic law of our country establishes a direct norm — the protection of the family, motherhood and childhood by the State. At the government level, a whole system of indicators has been developed that are subject to constant monitoring in order to ensure the relevance of state policy in the social sphere and its continuous improvement. The article presents an analysis of the main problems of state family policy in Russia through the prism of the main socio-economic indicators. Official statistics data were used.

The article examines the key aspects of military-technical cooperation between the Russian Federation and the Syrian Arab Republic in the first two terms of Vladimir Putin's tenure as President of Russia. Relations between Moscow and Damascus in the sphere of arms and special equipment supplies are considered in the general context of the updated foreign policy of the Russian Federation, initiated by Vladimir Putin, and which implied, among other things, the return of Russia's position as an active geopolitical player in the Middle East. Having long-standing political and economic ties with Moscow, Syria was rightly considered by the Russian leadership as the most suitable ally in solving the task mentioned above. Analyzing the history of supplies to Syria of the main articles of Russian military products, the author comes to the conclusion that during the period under review, Moscow managed to lay a new solid foundation for bilateral relations, even though it had to be done to a certain extent with an eye to the position of other regional players and, above all, the countries of the collective West. When building its political course towards the SAR in the period under review, the Kremlin adhered primarily to the principle of restraint and pragmatism, taking into account the realities of international relations in the Middle East region and setting as its main goal the counteraction of the hegemonic claims of the United States, which sought to turn this already conflictogenic point of the planet into a zone of "controlled chaos".

The article discusses the constitutional problems of consolidation, implementation and improvement of the mechanism of interaction between the parliament and higher courts in parliamentary procedures. The research methods are analysis, synthesis, normative (formal-logical), and historical-legal. The key aim of the study is to identify a mechanism for ensuring the control function of the parliament to control the implementation in the Russian Federation of laws adopted by the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. The author came to the following conclusions. In recent years, the higher courts of the Russian Federation have been more actively involved in the work on improving legislation in various ways. At the same time, in his annual address to the Federal Assembly on January 15, 2020, President of Russia Vladimir Putin outlined proposals to strengthen the role of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation in the legislative process. Since 2008, a trend has been outlined in Russia to strengthen the control powers of the parliament. One of the most important control powers of the Russian Federal Assembly, fixed in the Federal Law “On Parliamentary Control”, is, in the author’s opinion, the study of the application of laws (legal monitoring), the development of proposals for their improvement. However, along with the annual reports of the General Prosecutor of the Russian Federation at the Federation Council regarding effectiveness of legislation, it is seen necessary to oblige the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation to present reports on judicial practice in the State Duma. The Supreme Court, realizing the constitutional function of summarizing the judicial practice of the courts of the Russian Federation and developing a uniform interpretation of the norms of the law, often quite independently eliminates legal gaps, sometimes developing new legal rules, which is not fully consistent with the doctrine of separation of powers in continental law systems. Such new rules are developed within the framework of not only procedural law, but also substantive (civil and criminal) law. In fairness, it is worth noting that this is not a modern trend, it is the Russian practice that has developed over centuries: the Senate of the Russian Empire, being the highest court, developed new legal rules long before the legislator. All this, of course, does not fully correspond to the role of the court in the continental legal system. However, the same Senate of the Russian Empire, in accordance with the decree of Emperor Alexander I, also had the right to inform the emperor of the need to improve legislation. In this regard, taking into account the historical parallel, the author comes to the conclusion that there is an urgent need for Russia to introduce the annual practice of the Supreme Court’s reports to the State Duma as part of the parliamentary legal monitoring of legal gaps and conflicts identified by the Supreme Court when summarizing judicial practice, with its proposals for improving legislation.

The subject of the research is the BRICS countries activities. The purpose of the work is to assess the initiatives for creating the intergovernmental cooperation format BRICS+ as a factor of economic development of member states, as well as to suggest ways of the interaction mechanism perfection in the fields of trade, investments, multilateral cooperation of development banks, creating international financial centers and payment systems and making use of national currencies in mutual settlements. It is concluded that it is necessary to form favorable conditions for cooperation within new regional associations with the leading role of Russia, India and China. The urgency of the research lies in the fact that the assessment of achievements and prospects of the countries in the spheres of finance, trade and investments presented in the research allows to draw a conclusion about a positive character of the initiative to create the intergovernmental cooperation format BRICS+ and about advisability to expand multilateral interactions through trade agreements with mutual settlements in national currencies of partner countries, through simplification of investment mechanisms and their respective financial provision, primarily in financing major infrastructural projects that have an integration effect. The authors argue for the importance to create a decentralized integration model of interaction for parties via cooperating of a bigger number of participants, which will enable developing countries to meet global challenges and to solve developmental problems effectively. The authors also emphasize that the creation of BRICS+ is a significant initiative that will contribute to fulfilling the tasks formulated in the President of the Russian Federation V. V. Putin Decree “About national goals and strategic objectives of the RF development for the period till 2024” and in his message to the Federal Assembly on 20.02.2019.