Putin's presidency may hinder Russia's accession to World Trade Organization
People applaud after Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's speech at the United Russia party's congress in Moscow, Saturday, Sept. 24, 2011. AP

Putin's presidency may hinder Russia's accession to World Trade Organization

Sep 26, 2011 at 10:33 | Interfax-Ukraine
Moscow - After Vladimir Putin is elected Russian president hindrances may appear in the process of Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), political analyst Nikolai Zlobin believes.

"One can expect complications in Russia's accession to WTO," he told Interfax Sunday evening.

In his opinion, Russia's positions on missile defense and former Soviet republics will not change after Putin's election. "They will remain the same as under Russian President Dmitry Medvedev," Zlobin felt.

In his opinion, Medvedev is somewhat disappointed with the United States. "Medvedev today is less pro-American than he was three years ago," he said.

"Many Russian leaders since Gorbachev's times had exaggerated expectations with regard to the West and the United States but with time they vanished. That happened to Yeltsin, and that happened to Medvedev too," Zlobin thinks.

"Medvedev realizes that Americans are acting primarily in their own interests without taking the interests of Russia into account," he said.

Medvedev has been making many sarcastic remarks concerning the United States lately, the analyst said. "That is a normal protective political reaction," he said.

In his opinion, the reaction of the West to Putin's election "will be pragmatic to a certain degree." "They will work with Putin too though in recent times there was the feeling that Americans were ignoring the prime minister," he said.

"In any case there was no channel of working with the prime minister in Russian-U.S. relations," Zlobin said adding that U.S. President Barack Obama "talked much about Medvedev."

In his opinion, the West hoped that Medvedev would remain president. "However, in the event of Putin's election there will be no new anti-Western rhetoric or new Munich speech because the situation in the world now is absolutely different," Zlobin said.

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