Russian President Putin said on the Rossiya-1 TV documentary “Russia. Kremlin. Putin,” program this evening, “I think Russia will be able to get over everything, to cope with everything and survive. The question is the price of it.” He was asked if Russia could have withstood such a crisis had it happened 20 years ago. Putin replied that “the 1990s were a difficult time” and Russia received humanitarian aid “not because of any man-induced or any natural calamities, but as the world’s poorest nation, to help people stay alive, not to let them die of hunger. This is how we lived,” he said, adding that Russia back then had been unable to “pay wages without foreign loans .… And wages were not paid for months, even to the military….
“Our GDP doubled in a period from 1999 to 2019. It means the economy grew two-fold. Inflation was 2,600%, even in 1997, when the first signs of GDP growth only emerged, inflation was 11%. Now we had 3% last year.