Agenda: Subsidising regional projects to develop electric urban transit options, supporting regions, state of competition report.
Government meeting
Head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service Maxim Shaskolsky at a Government meeting
Government meeting
Government meeting
Excerpts from the transcript:
Mikhail Mishustin: Colleagues, good afternoon.
I will start with a decision which is designed to improve the quality of life for people across many Russian regions. The Government persists in its efforts to upgrade the public transit fleet. Just as the President has emphasised, developing public transit is something that matters for millions of people in our country, in fact, for almost everyone.
The Government has been committed to supporting regions so that passengers can benefit from convenient commutes and get to their destinations quickly. For that, we have been relying on several programmes, including by offering subsidised leasing contracts on preferential terms, using dedicated treasury loans, allocating funding from the National Wealth Fund, and several other tools. Starting in 2025, these efforts continued as part of the Infrastructure for Life national project.
Taken together, this enabled us to generate positive momentum in terms of upgrading the public transit fleet. Last year alone, 73 Russian regions received 8,000 buses, trolleybuses, tramways and e-buses.
The Government has now issued a directive to specify modalities for contracting preferential loans to buy surface electric public transit vehicles for the cities, as well as creating the necessary infrastructure, including access roads and charging stations.
About 4 billion roubles will be allocated to this effect in 2025. This will improve passenger service in nine regions: the Volgograd, Kursk, Lipetsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov, Saratov and Yaroslavl regions, as well as in the Krasnodar and Perm territories. This funding will be equal to 12 billion roubles over the three-year budget cycle.
The Government expects these measures to make city streets less noisy, while also reducing emissions thanks to switching to more eco-friendly transit options. Importantly, this will offer passengers better user experience and improve passenger safety in many parts of the country.
Today’s agenda also covers several other items dealing with supporting the regions.
The President has said that all Russian regions have solid growth potential and it is essential that we help them unleash it, benefit from it and to put it to good use by focusing on the most promising sectors.
The Government has been consistently moving in this direction. There is a special state programme for promoting economic development in the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol – it provided for building hundreds of essential facilities, including utilities networks, motor roads and railways, including the Taurida Motorway and the bridge over the Kerch Strait. The airport in Simferopol also benefited from upgrades. There are also new kindergartens, schools, cutting-edge health and recreational institutions, offering a comfortable and state-of-the-art environment for young people and children who come there to exercise and practice sports activities. We have also built hospitals and outpatient clinics so that people can benefit from quality care and treatments.
Funding for the state programme to develop Crimea and Sevastopol has already exceeded 112 billion roubles this year. Today, we will allocate another 3 billion roubles to this effect. The Government will also help the Kemerovo Region by allocating about 2.7 billion roubles for addressing the social challenges people face in the Kuzbass region.
The Government reaffirms its commitment to doing everything it can to improve the quality of life for our people across the nation.
During the meeting, we will also review the report on the state of competition in Russia. The Federal Antimonopoly Service drafts it annually as per its legal mandate.
This agency focuses on pricing policies, which is something that really matters for our people. It also oversees commodity-driven monopolies and fights price fixing in all sectors of the economy.
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