- By Mike Eckel
Quick little shout-out for the Soviet Union.
This is of course not new for Putin; it's a theme that has run throughout the 20 years he's has been in Russia's president: the restoration, or re-emphasis, of the accomplishments of the Soviet period.
"There's a lot to be proud of from the Soviet period. We should be grateful to our grandfathers, our predecessors for creating such a world power," he says,.
Kremlin politics aside, it's a sentiment shared by a growing number of Russians.
Throwback Thursday: A look back at Vladimir Putin's first annual press conference in 2001, shortly after he was elected president.
Hot topics included security "sweeps" in Chechnya and the deadly sinking of the Kursk submarine.
- By Mike Eckel
Oooh. A question about doping.
Recall that global anti-doping regulators have come down hard on Russia, accusing it of basically doing nothing to clean-up its internal system for testing athletes for banned substances. And they've been accused of purposely trying to fool regulators.
(The Oscar-award winning documentary Icarus went deep into this question (it's a good flick).)
Earlier this month, the World Anti-Doping Agency executive committee called for banning Russian athletes and officials from the Olympics and world championships in a range of sports for four years.
It's a decision that really hit the Kremlin hard: restoring Russia's sporting glory-- from the Soviet period when Soviet athletes regularly won Olympic golds and world championships-- has a priority for Putin.
"Not is it only unjust, but it also doesn't confirm to correct thinking," he says, about the WADA decision.
- By Mike Eckel
Putin fields a question about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, saying he was alarmed by Zelenskiy's statements after the recent Normandy Summit in Paris (Zelenskiy, Putin, Merkel, Macron) that Ukraine wants to revisit the Minsk Accords.
He also suggest that Ukrainian forces have been slow to pull back from the front line. (This is disputable.)
"We have nothing except the Minsk agreement. If we start revisiting agreements, we end up at a dead end," he says.
Putin also says he's ready to meet with Zelenskiy again.
(The meeting in Paris was Putin and Zelenskiy's first face-to-face meeting since Zelenskiy's election.)
He also follows up by fielding a question from a Ukrainian reporter, more specifically about the war in eastern Ukraine.
And he denies again that there are Russian forces fighting in the two territories that are held by separatist fighters, who call the regions the Luhansk People's Republic and the Donetsk People's Republic (LNR and DNR).
"There are no foreign troops in LNR and DNR. The self-defense forces consist of local people... There are some foreigners, like Germans and French, who are fighting on both sides, but the major part of the forces are local people," Putin says.
Answering a question from a Ukrainian journalist, Putin says there are no "foreign forces" in the Donbas except for mercenaries on both sides who come from countries such as France and Germany.
Pro-Russian forces obtain tanks and heavy artillery from "government agencies that are sympathetic to them" in Ukraine, he says.
Ukrainian correspondent Roman Tsymbalyuk, who has asked about the war in Ukraine every year since it broke out in 2014, has once again been called on to ask a question.
Tsymbalyuk preceded this year's query (regarding compliance with the Mink agreement -- the road map for resolving the conflict in Ukraine's east) by noting that he gets no harassment as a journalist in Russia.
The Moscow correspondent for Ukrainian news agency UNIAN has done the rounds on Russian political talk-shows and appears to take an increasingly chirpy tone each year.
We profiled Tsymbalyuk in 2017.
- By Mike Eckel
Gas War!
Russia and Ukraine are locked in serious negotiations about a new agreement about natural gas shipments supplying Ukraine, and transiting Ukraine (on their way to lucrative European markets).
The current agreement expires December 31.
The reason this is called a "Gas War" is that there have been two instances in the past decade or so when the two sides were unable to agree on terms, and it resulted in gas being interrupted to Europe-- leaving several European countries shivering in January cold.
An another element to this year's talks is a London arbitration court ruling in favor of Ukraine's state gas company Naftogaz, who had asked for the freezing of assets of Russia's gas company, Gazprom.
Asked about the potential for another "Gas War", Putin appears to signal that talks won't end up at that point, say he thinks there will be an agreement.