Vladimir Putin invited all officials to switch from foreign cars to domestic cars

All Russian officials must drive domestically produced cars, President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with heads of manufacturing enterprises. According to him, he was approached by ministries and departments with a request to focus on the purchase of foreign cars, but he stressed that this should be “absolutely excluded.”

“All officials in the country should drive domestic cars,” Putin said. – Somewhere it will be more modest than before – it’s okay, on the contrary, it’s even good. All this wonderful bureaucracy should understand that we need to strive for the development of domestic brands, cars, and other products.”

Russia does not need to completely abandon imports, but “some basic things” should be focused on domestic producers, the head of state added.

Russian enterprises will be able to satisfy the need for cars for government agencies, the Ministry of Industry and Trade said after the president’s statement. “The production capacity of Russian enterprises will meet the need for vehicles for the purchase of government agencies,” the ministry said.

On July 11, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin already asked deputies to support the position of the Ministry of Finance, whose employees, by decision of the head of department Anton Siluanov, will switch to Russian cars with a deep level of localization (the lower house’s fleet includes Ford, BMW and other cars from manufacturers from unfriendly countries).

“It is in our power to replenish the park of the State Duma with Lada and Moskvich as soon as possible. Therefore, let’s proceed from this,” Volodin said, adding that some deputies are already using domestic cars. Volodin recalled that Putin uses a domestic car – Aurus. At the same time, he added that localization should be taken into account, since “deep localization will allow us to create new enterprises that will work for assembly, for the conveyor.”

A few days later, on July 16, the speaker launched a poll on his Telegram channel. He asked if his subscribers “considered it right to buy domestic brands of cars for executive authorities, deputies, budgetary institutions, state corporations.” As a result, 90% of 208,000 answered “yes” (Volodin conducted such polls on sensitive topics during covid before passing or introducing laws).

The question is what exactly is considered a product of the Russian automobile industry. At the moment, there are no requirements in the legislation that define the term “Russian product”, there is only a “product manufactured in the territory of the Russian Federation,” says independent automotive industry consultant Sergei Burgazliev.

Government Decree No. 719 contains criteria for confirming the production of industrial products in the country, but now they are quite liberal (spare parts and assembly may be non-Russian. – Vedomosti). “Otherwise, no cars could pass the Russian criteria,” he concluded.

AvtoVAZ is most actively trying to localize production, but we can only talk about full import substitution by 50%, Burgazliev summed up: “Until February 2022, the level of localization was extremely low, and factories were engaged in “pseudo-localization”: passed off as Russian.

“Requirements in public procurement are shifting to ensure that only Russian-made cars are purchased for state needs,” says Maxim Kuznetsov, General Director of Tenderplan. – It will no longer be possible to be guided by the previous policy in procurement from customers. Previously, they could simply post information about the required brand of a car, even of foreign production, but now they are forced to purchase only those cars that meet the localization conditions and the share of production processes of which is carried out on the territory of the Russian Federation.

At the same time, it is important to note that the exact figures for the level of localization are not publicly disclosed, they are known only to manufacturers, he stressed. According to the Tenderplan, in the first half of 2023 alone, 248 notices for 597 million rubles were placed, while for the whole of 2022 388 tenders for 650 million rubles were raffled off.

The initiative is due to the fact that many foreign auto brands showed their attitude towards Russia when they curtailed their dealer network and other services, political analyst Alexander Nemtsev points out. He recalled that premium German and Japanese brands did this.

“This suggests that the attitude of these brands is hostile to our country. It will be strange enough when [главы этих марок] they say they are not going to cooperate with Russia, and officials will continue to use these cars,” he said. Nemtsev believes that so far there are no cars on the domestic market that could completely replace such models as the Toyota Camry, which in most cases make up the fleet of regional officials.

Alexei Makarkin, First Vice President of the Center for Political Technologies, pointed out that it would be impossible to ignore the president’s words, and therefore the auto industry and officials would have to find a way out. “Here you can act differently: say that we, of course, support the initiative, but our specific department needs to keep a foreign car. Officials are already accustomed to these cars, so changing buses for them is psychologically difficult,” he admits.

The idea to transfer officials to domestic cars is not new. In 1997, the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, signed a decree banning the purchase of foreign cars for government officials. This idea was proposed to the head of state by First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, for which he was criticized by officials and the press. The government was instructed to sell the fleet of foreign cars at auction and take the necessary measures to ensure the improvement of the quality of those produced by the domestic industry. Nemtsov urged officials to use the Volga, which he himself used as an example.

In 1998, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov also supported the idea of ​​creating luxury variations of Moskvich. Elongated sedans of the executive class “Ivan Kalita” and “Prince Vladimir” began to be produced. The latter was driven by Luzhkov himself. He also participated in the advertising campaigns of the plant – for example, he opened the Moskvich rally to Novosibirsk and back. Most of the issued representative cars of this brand were used by Moscow officials and organizations related to them, Kommersant wrote. In fact, Yeltsin’s order was never carried out. Already in 1999, by his decree, he invalidated several previously published acts, including his order on the purchase of foreign cars.

In April 2012, Putin (then prime minister and president-elect of Russia) stated that state and municipal authorities need to “buy only vehicles produced on the territory of the Russian Federation and the Common Economic Space.” That is, cars assembled in Russia, Belarus or Kazakhstan.

Later, the president himself began to come to public events in an Aurus car (assembled in Tatarstan). For the first time, he drove this car through the territory of the Kremlin, going to his inauguration on May 7, 2018 from his office at the residence. In addition, at a meeting on the development of the automotive industry in 2020, Putin asked the government to “strictly control” that state authorities, departments, state-owned companies acquire the equipment necessary for work, “but by no means foreign limousines.”