Russia Terror Threat Very High: PM Putin

MOSCOW : Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Thursday a train bombing that killed 26 people last week showed the threat to Russia from militant rebel groups was very high.

Opening a marathon annual phone-in with the Russian people, Putin said Russia was determined to “break the spine” of terrorism and called for tough and decisive action against “criminals” who attacked their own people. “The threat of terrorism remains very high,” Putin said.

Islamist rebels have claimed responsibility for detonating a bomb under a luxury express train as it travelled from Moscow to St Petersburg last week, derailing and wrecking carriages and killing 26 people, including some senior officials.

Putin also said in opening remarks at Thursday’s phone-in that he believed that the peak of Russia’s economic crisis had passed, though the exit from it would require “time, strength and no little funds”.The televised phone-in, which was to involve video links to hotspots such as the crisis-hit city which makes Lada cars, was Putin’s eighth and has become something of a national institution.

It offers the premier — who most Russians believe takes all key decisions — blanket exposure on state-controlled media and a chance to bolster his still-high popularity ratings, which have drooped slightly in recent weeks.

Putin’s approval rating is at an eight-month low of 65 percent, down from 72 percent in mid-October, according to a weekly poll of 2,000 people by the Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) released on Thursday.”A Conversation with Vladimir Putin. The Sequel” was being broadcast on state television and radio from a conference centre next to the Kremlin. Last year’s carefully choreographed phone-in lasted a marathon three hours and eight minutes.

This year Putin was to be linked up to Togliatti, home to the struggling Lada car maker AvtoVAZ, and Pikalyovo, a town where he intervened in the summer to save a threatened cement factory and publicly humiliate its oligarch owner.

The government said Putin has already received over 700,000 questions by phone, text messages and through the Internet.The premier, who served as president from 2000-08 before handing over his Kremlin post to hand-picked ally Dmitry Medvedev, spent all day Wednesday in his residence in a forested Moscow suburb preparing for the show.

“He is working with the background material, going through the questions,” said Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov.This year, the government posted some questions of its choice on the website www.moskva-putinu.ru but did not disclose the full list. The published questions focused on corruption, bureaucracy and government-provided social benefits.

Last year Putin joked when a caller asked if he had called for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to be “hung by his balls” for his role in Russia’s war with Georgia.He also invited a girl from a remote Siberian region who asked for a dress to celebrate New Year in Moscow.An increase in oil prices has helped to pull the Russian economy from the brink of collapse earlier this year.

But despite billions of dollars spent on stimulus policies, industrial growth has failed to materialise and Russia is lagging far behind its emerging market peers such as Brazil, India and China.