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Just when everything was beginning to look rosy in Russian adoption comes this: The entire government of President Vladimir Putin resigned today. Yes, that includes Andrei Aleksandrovich Fursenko, the minister of education, and the heads of all the ministries on which we have all been hanging our hopes for a swift resolution of the re-accreditation mess. The move, which came at his request according to news sources, paves the way for a fresh government ahead of the December legislative elections and perhaps an answer to the question of who will succeed Putin in the presidential elections next March.
According to news reports, Putin quickly announced his choice for new prime minister, Viktor Zubkov. Largely an unknown, he has been heading up the Federal Financial Monitoring Service, an agency in charge of Russia’s efforts against money laundering. The BBC says that Zubkov’s main task of late has been keeping an eye on the whereabouts of the fortunes of Russia’s billionaires and millionaires.
The choice of Zubkov seems to have caught everybody–in Russia and out–by surprise. Most observers had expected that the successor to the most recent prime minister, Mikhail Fradkov, would be one of Russia’s two first deputy prime ministers, Sergei B. Ivanov or Dmitri A. Medvedev. But Fradkov was also something of a question mark for most Russians before he was tapped as prime minister, having most recently served as Russia’s ambassador to the European Union in Brussels.
Pundits are now wondering what this means for the future: Namely, whether Zubkov will be Putin’s hand-picked presidential successor, much the way Putin was the choice of Boris Yeltsin in 1999. Sergei Ivanenko, one of the leaders of the anti-Putin party Yabloko told the Associated Press, that the move “gives a deja vu feeling”.
I, like you, am more concerned about what’s going to happen at the ministries we need to finish accrediting all the adoption agencies. The head of one agency’s Russia program expressed the hope that Fursenko will be re-appointed by Zubkov because Fursenko is a technocrat and a key Putin ally.
Let’s all hope he’s right.
Image credit: inkjetprinter
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