He will turn the calendar upside down – Newspaper Kommersant No. 237 (7438) of 12/21/2022

There will be no presidential address to the Federal Assembly in 2022, Kommersant’s sources told Kommersant: “preparatory preparation” for the speech was carried out, but the presidential administration (AP) did not reach the scale of work on the text. As Kommersant’s interlocutor in the AP explains, it is better to announce the message when the situation in the special military operation zone (SVO) becomes more clear. The expert agrees with this: the president traditionally talks about the future in his address, and in the context of the current “dynamic agenda”, the message really should be postponed.

The fact that it is no longer worth waiting for the announcement of the presidential address to the Federal Assembly in 2022, Kommersant was told by three sources close to the Presidential Administration. According to them, most likely, it will be shifted to next year.

Last week, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on this topic twice. He refuted the information of a RIA Novosti source in the Duma that the message could be announced on December 27. And to the question of journalists, “is it possible to send a message next year”, he answered: “Of course, it is possible. This is such a fairly obvious truth, ”but at the same time he suggested “stop fortune-telling on coffee grounds.”

According to Art. 84 of the Constitution, the president “addresses the Federal Assembly with annual messages on the situation in the country, on the main directions of the domestic and foreign policy of the state.” However, back in 2017, the Kremlin came to the conclusion that this wording does not mean the obligation of the head of state to speak to senators and deputies at least once a year (although this was actually the case for a long time). Then the Presidential Administration decided to move the message from the end of 2017 to the first half of 2018: on March 18, the presidential elections were held, and the message announced in early March actually played the role of candidate Vladimir Putin’s program speech (especially since he did not have an official election program for those elections). was). “There is no legislative obligation to announce the message before the geographic end of the current year. This is not spelled out in the Constitution and other legislative acts, ”explained then the presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov.

Message-2021 was announced on April 21, and there were no plans to seriously delay the next address until the start of the NWO in the Kremlin. “We are having our first meeting today as part of the preparation of a message to the Federal Assembly,” Vladimir Putin himself said on February 17, 2022, adding that the message should show “the direction of development of the country, its economy and the basis on which, of course, we will decide the main task is to improve the well-being of our citizens.” But by the summer of 2022, Kommersant’s sources stopped talking about consultations with experts and departments on this issue.

Note that usually the message is preceded by a lengthy preparation. The government should work out all the necessary information for him, including social initiatives that the president can publish. Also, ideas for the message are collected from experts. In November, RBC reported that such work had begun in the Kremlin, and later two Kommersant sources close to the Presidential Administration spoke about the same. Already in December, one of them said that preliminary proposals were indeed collected from experts, but this was a “very early level” of work: “They asked: what would you consider it appropriate to see in the message. It’s straight up preparation.” This information was confirmed by another source of Kommersant. But, according to him, he soon got the impression that the preparations had “faded”: he increasingly heard the explanation that the president’s mandatory appeal to parliament this year was not required. And in mid-December, a source in the Presidential Administration bluntly told Kommersant that there was definitely no large-scale work on the message in his department.

“The annuality of the message can be interpreted not only in such a way that it is done every year, but also as the fact that it concerns every year, and is announced as soon as it is ready. Then it’s clear why it didn’t come out every year and it didn’t exist in 2017,” Oleg Zakharov, a political lawyer and head of the executive committee of the New People party, explains the Kremlin’s logic. In his opinion, if during 2023 the message nevertheless takes place, then nothing terrible will happen and formally it can be “counted”. Moreover, sending a message to the parliament in writing is also acceptable (deputies of the State Duma from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation spoke about this earlier), the expert believes: “There are no legal obstacles to this. Formally, the message is generally more of a document than the speech itself.”

However, a well-informed Kommersant source in the Presidential Administration assures that it is not worth waiting for a correspondence message, because even during the pandemic, the president found the opportunity to speak in person. As for the timing, the president should speak to parliamentarians only when the situation on the fronts is clear, the interlocutor adds. “Vladimir Putin’s message is always connected with a certain picture of the future,” explains a source close to the Presidential Administration, adding that the message will also have to talk about the NWO, and it is still difficult to make forecasts on it. The interlocutor in the Presidential Administration draws attention to the fact that the president is now regularly speaking in public: recently, for example, he spoke in detail about the opposition to Western sanctions at a meeting of the Council for Strategic Development. This speech could, according to the source, become a full-fledged socio-economic part of the message if it were planned.

Political analyst Alexander Asafov agrees that Vladimir Putin is regularly “present on the public agenda”, and there is also a meeting of the State Council ahead. But the message is not just a wide public conversation, it is an important state event with clear tasks, the expert emphasizes: “In it, the president really talks about what will happen and sets specific tasks for the Federal Assembly. This is not a reporting event. And given the dynamic agenda that is now really present, I think it was decided to postpone it to a later date, ”the political scientist sums up.

Andrey Vinokurov