PRESS RELEASE
President Putin’s Call To Action at the Valdai International Discussion Club
Oct. 28, 2016 (EIRNS)—Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday delivered the closing speech to this year’s Valdai International Discussion Club meeting in Sochi, Russia. He issued a stirring call to action in the concluding section of his remarks. After describing the horror wrought across the Middle East and North Africa, he stated:
"The mammoth scale of destruction demands drawing up a long-term comprehensive program, a kind of Marshall Plan, to revive the war- and conflict-ridden area. Russia is certainly willing to join actively in these team efforts.
"We cannot achieve global stability unless we guarantee global economic progress. It is essential to provide conditions for creative labor and economic growth at a pace that would put an end to the division of the world into permanent winners and permanent losers. The rules of the game should give the developing economies at least a chance to catch up with those we know as developed economies. We should work to level out the pace of economic development, and brace up backward countries and regions so as to make the fruit of economic growth and technological progress accessible to all. Particularly, this would help to put an end to poverty, one of the worst contemporary problems....
"That is how we arrange the work of the Eurasian Economic Union and conduct negotiations with our partners, particularly on coordination with the Silk Road Economic Belt project, which China is implementing. We expect it to promote an extensive Eurasian partnership, which promises to evolve into one of the formative centers of a vast Eurasian integration area....
"An important task of ours is to develop human potential. Only a world with ample opportunities for all, with highly skilled workers, access to knowledge and a great variety of ways to realise their potential can be considered truly free....
"All people in the world, not only the elite, should have the right to healthy, long and full lives. This is a noble goal. In short, we should build the foundation for the future world today by investing in all priority areas of human development. And of course, it is necessary to continue a broad-based discussion of our common future so that all sensible and promising initiatives are heard... and put forward new initiatives and recommendations that will help us find the way to the more prosperous and sustainable future that we all badly need."
