Srinagar, Mar 12: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman would unveil the Jammu & Kashmir Union Territory’s budget for the next fiscal in the Parliament on Monday (March 13). This would be the fourth budget of J&K UT in the Parliament after reorganization of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir in August 2019.
As per list of Lok Sabha’s business scheduled for tomorrow, a copy of which is in possession of news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), the Union Finance Minister will present a statement showing the demands for grants in respect of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir for the year 2022-23.
She will also present a statement showing the supplementary demands for grants- second batch for 2022-23.
The budget is being presented in the Parliament as law-making powers of Jammu & Kashmir Union Territory are vested with it in absence of an elected government in the UT.
This would be the fourth consecutive budget of J&K UT in the Parliament. The budgets of UT for 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 were unveiled in the Parliament by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
In June 2018, the Jammu & Kashmir came under Governor’s rule after BJP withdrew support to Mehbooba Mufti-led government citing deteriorating security situation in the state. The budget for 2019-20 was approved by the Governor-led State Administrative Council in December 2018 days before the erstwhile state came under President’s rule under Article 356 of the Constitution of India.
In the run-up to the budget, top officials of J&K’s Finance department are stationed in New Delhi over the past three days.
“ Director General, Budget MY Itoo and Joint Director Budget Shafat Yahya have already reached New Delhi. More officials are likely to join them tomorrow,” a senior official of Finance department told KNO.
He said the size of J&K budget for next fiscal would be more than1.15 lakh crore.
For the ongoing fiscal (2022-23), Jammu and Kashmir was granted budget of Rs 112950 crore.
In the Union budget for next fiscal, J&K has been allocated Rs 35581.44 crore, of which Rs 33,923 crore is central assistance. The central assistance is given mainly to the UT to meet its resource gap—(KNO)
SRINAGAR: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman would unveil the Jammu & Kashmir Union Territory budget for the next fiscal in the Parliament on Monday. This would be the fourth budget of J&K UT in the Parliament after the reorganization of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir in August 2019.
As per the list of Lok Sabha’s business scheduled for tomorrow, the Union Finance Minister will present a statement showing the demands for grants in respect of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir for the year 2022-23.
She will also present a statement showing the supplementary demands for grants- the second batch for 2022-23.
The budget is being presented in the Parliament as law-making powers of Jammu & Kashmir Union Territory are vested with it in absence of an elected government in the UT.
This would be the fourth consecutive budget of J&K UT in the Parliament. The budgets of UT for 2020-21, 2021-22, and 2022-23 were unveiled in the Parliament by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.
In June 2018, Jammu & Kashmir came under Governor’s rule after BJP withdrew support to Mehbooba Mufti-led government citing the deteriorating security situation in the state. The budget for 2019-20 was approved by the Governor-led State Administrative Council in December 2018 days before the erstwhile state came under President’s rule under Article 356 of the Constitution of India.
In the run-up to the budget, top officials of J&K’s Finance department are stationed in New Delhi over the past three days.
“Director General, Budget MY Itoo, and Joint Director Budget Shafat Yahya have already reached New Delhi. More officials are likely to join them tomorrow,” a senior official of the Finance department said.
He said the size of the J&K budget for the next fiscal would be more than 1.15 lakh crore.
For the ongoing fiscal year, Jammu and Kashmir were granted a budget of Rs 112950 crore.
In the Union budget for the next fiscal, J&K has been allocated Rs 35581.44 crore, of which Rs 33,923 crore is central assistance. The central assistance is given mainly to the UT to meet its resource gap. (KNO)
Hyderabad: Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) Andhra Pradesh president Thota Chandrasekhar on Saturday said that the party would be contesting from all the 175 Assembly and 25 parliament seats in the upcoming elections.
Chandrashekar said that BRS will be taking on Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party (YSRCP) in the polls as the party was receiving an overwhelming response from the people of Andhra.
“Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) do not have any presence in Andhra Pradesh and the people are fed up with YSRCP and TDP. Both parties are steeped in corruption. BRS has a chance to fill the gap,” he said.
Agartala: Taking a serious note of the clashes and violence in the aftermath of the elections in BJP-ruled Tripura, a Left-Congress delegation on Saturday said it will raise the issue in Parliament to bring the matter to the knowledge of all countrymen.
Members of the delegation, who had come under an attack of miscreants in Nehalchandranagar on Friday, during its tour of violence-hit areas, also said that senior leaders of the Left and the Congress will meet President Droupadi Murmu to apprise her of the “terror tactics unleashed by the BJP and RSS” in states ruled by the saffron camp.
Three people have so far been arrested in connection with Friday’s incident in Nehalchandranagar area of Sepahijala district.
Addressing a press conference, CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP Elmaram Kareem claimed that the “BJP-RSS- backed goons have not just mounted attacks on the people of the state but also destroyed means of their livelihood”, as many of them were forced to flee homes.
“The police are not taking action against the troublemakers, allowing them to roam about free for more vandalism in the northeastern state. It appears that law and order has completely collapsed in Tripura and the government has miserably failed to maintain peace,” he told reporters here.
Kareem, who arrived here along with seven MPs and senior leaders to take stock of the situation in Tripura, said that “the fact-finding delegation had called on Governor Satyadeo Narain Arya and briefed him about the prevailing condition” in the state, where elections were held on February 16 and the result declared on March 2.
The governor gave the delegation assurance that he would look into the matter and do the needful, the CPI(M) leader stated. “We will raise this issue of post-election violence in the both houses of Parliament to draw the attention of the country. People outside the state are not aware about the very serious situation here,” he added.
All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary Ajay Kumar, who was also present at the press meet, claimed that the BJP has installed “Talibani raj” in Tripura.
Expressing concern over the attack on the MP delegation, Kumar said that the state had long been witnessing incidents of violence but “no measure has been taken to restore peace and order”.
“Neither the prime minister nor the home minister has made any statement on the attack on MP delegation in Tripura. It is an insult to Parliament,” he said.
CPI(M) state secretary Jitendra Chaudhury said over 1,000 incidents of post-poll violence have been reported in the state
“Youth bearing affiliation to opposition camps had to leave homes and run for their lives in the wake of the unabated attacks. We want the government to be sympathetic towards those affected in the midst of post-poll violence,” he said.
Tripura Congress president Birajit Sinha claimed that a “civil war-like situation” may arise in the state, if nothing was done immediately to stop the miscreants.
Among others, CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharjee was present at the meet.
Meanwhile, BJP spokesperson Nabendu Bhattacharjee alleged that a “deep-rooted conspiracy” was behind the attack on the delegation.
“The Left and the Congress are simply trying to defame the BJP at the national stage. Chief Minister Manik Saha, who is in Delhi, has already spoken to the DGP and instructed him to take stern legal action on those involved in the attack. Senior party leaders have also discussed the matter with local functionaries,” said Bhattcharjee.
The BJP-IPFT government recently returned to power in the state for the second consecutive term, with the saffron party bagging 32 seats in the 60-member assembly and the regional outfit securing one constituency.
The French Senate voted in favor of the controversial pension reform overnight, paving the way for a potential final adoption of the law on Thursday, as thousands of people continue to demonstrate across the country.
The widespread opposition to the retirement overhaul is a political test to French President Emmanuel Macron, whose liberal party has been struggling to pass the reform ever since it lost its majority in parliament last summer.
“A decisive step to bring about a reform that will ensure the future of our pensions. Totally committed to allow a final adoption in the next few days,” French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne tweeted after the vote.
The French government wants to change the retirement age from 62 to 64, with a full pension requiring 43 years of work as of 2027. The right-leaning Senate adopted the reform with 195 in favor and 112 against the measure.
Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated across France on Saturday, and protests were expected to continue on Sunday. So far, strikes have disrupted sectors including public transport, oil refineries, schools and airports.
On Sunday, Laurent Berger — who heads the largest French labor union — said: “I call on parliamentarians to see what’s happening in their districts. … You can’t vote for a reform that’s rejected by so many in the workforce.”
During the presidential campaign, Macron vowed to reform the French pension system to bring it in line with other European countries like Spain and Germany, where the retirement age is 65 to 67 years old.
Official forecasts show that the French pensions system is financially in balance for now, but it’s expected to build up a deficit in the longer term.
French labor unions are calling for a “powerful day of strikes and demonstrations” on Wednesday, when lawmakers from the Senate and National Assembly are set to hold a small-group meeting to find a compromise on the pensions revamp. If they do reach an agreement, the law could be adopted on Thursday.
The government could also ultimately decide to adopt the revamp using an exceptional procedure that requires no parliamentary vote.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
London: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi interacts with UKs Members of Parliament, academics, journalists, community leaders and leaders of the Indian Overseas Congress at the Grand Committee Room, UK Parliament, in London, Tuesday, March 7, 2023. (PTI Photo)
London: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi during the interaction with UKs Members of Parliament, academics, journalists, community leaders and leaders of the Indian Overseas Congress at the Grand Committee Room, UK Parliament, in London, Tuesday, March 7, 2023. (PTI Photo)
London: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi during the interaction with UKs Members of Parliament, academics, journalists, community leaders and leaders of the Indian Overseas Congress at the Grand Committee Room, UK Parliament, in London, Tuesday, March 7, 2023. (PTI Photo)
London: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi interacts with UKs Members of Parliament, academics, journalists, community leaders and leaders of the Indian Overseas Congress at the Grand Committee Room, UK Parliament, in London, Tuesday, March 7, 2023. (PTI Photo)
London: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi told British parliamentarians in the Houses of Parliament complex in London on Monday that functioning microphones in the Lok Sabha are often silenced against the Opposition.
During an event organised by veteran Indian-origin Opposition Labour Party MP Virendra Sharma in the Grand Committee Room within the House of Commons, Gandhi also shared experiences from the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ which he described as a “deeply political exercise in mass mobilisation”.
In a lighter vein, he used a faulty microphone in the room to make his point about what he described as a “stifling” of Opposition in India.
“Our mikes are not out of order, they are functioning, but you still can’t switch them on. That’s happened to me a number of times while I am speaking,” the 52-year-old Wayanad MP told the gathering, in response to a question about sharing his experience of being a politician in India with his counterparts in Britain.
“Demonetisation, which was a disastrous financial decision, we were not allowed to discuss. The GST we were not allowed to discuss. Chinese troops entering Indian territory we were not allowed to discuss. I remember a Parliament where there were vibrant discussions, heated debates, arguments, disagreements but we had a conversation. And, that’s frankly what we miss in Parliament. We have to use debates to fit in other debates. There is a stifling that is going on,” he said.
The BJP has accused Gandhi of maligning India on foreign soil while praising China.
Union Minister Anurag Thakur on Monday hit out at Gandhi for his remarks and asked the Congress leader not to betray the nation.
“Don’t betray India, Rahul Gandhi ji. The objections to India’s foreign policy is an evidence of your scant understanding of the issue. No one will believe the lies you spread about India from foreign soil,” Thakur told reporters in New Delhi.
Thakur said Gandhi has resorted to “maligning India” from foreign soil as part of a conspiracy to hide his failures.
“Rahul Gandhi has become a storm of controversies. Be it foreign agencies, foreign channels or be it foreign soil. He does not lose a single opportunity to malign India,” Thakur said.
Gandhi took questions from the group of MPs and peers from the House of Lords to also highlight the importance of India-UK relations to create greater employment opportunities and also to protect Indian democracy.
“Democracy in India is a global public good. India is big enough, where if democracy is weakened in India, it is weakened on the planet. India’s democracy is three times the size of the US and Europe and if this democracy crumbles, it will be a huge setback for democracy on the planet,” he said.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Sunday apologized over the country’s deadliest train disaster and said he will ask Brussels for help to overhaul the country’s railway network as mass protests continued unabated.
“As prime minister, I owe everyone, but above all the relatives of the victims, a big SORRY,” Mitsotakis wrote on Facebook. “In the Greece of 2023, it is not possible for two trains to run on opposite sides of the same track without anyone noticing.”
Two trains traveling at high speed in opposite directions on the same line collided head-on in Tempe in northern Greece on February 28, killing at least 57 people and injuring 85. A train with at least 350 on board including many university students hit a cargo train.
“We can’t, won’t and shouldn’t hide behind human error,” added the prime minister. Mitsotakis previouslysaid on March 1 that the disaster was “primarily down to a tragic human error.”
The stationmaster for the city of Larissa faces charges of negligent homicide and admitted to some responsibility in his first court appearance on Sunday, according to Greek broadcaster ERT.
But Greece’s aging 2,550-kilometer rail network has been in desperate need of modernizing and has faced criticism for alleged mismanagement, unfit equipment and poor maintenance.
The deadly crash has prompted massive protests across the country about the government’s responsibility in the disaster as the first funerals of the victims were taking place. Thousands of people gathered on Sunday in front of the parliament in Athens, including several children. “This crime will not be covered up. We will be the voice of all the dead,” protesters chanted as they released black balloons into the sky.
Clashes erupted between police and demonstrators during the protests in Athens, the country’s second-largest city of Thessaloniki and Larissa, the city where the accident took place, with police using tear gas and sound grenades.
Protests have been staged over the last five days across the country and more have been called for the coming week. National rail services were halted as workers have been on strike since the crash.
Mitsotakis, who is preparing for elections in the spring, has promised an independent expert committee will investigate the cause of the accident. He also said he will ask the European Commission and other EU capitals for help.
“I will immediately ask the European Commission and friendly countries for their contribution to know-how so that we can finally obtain modern trains,” said Mitsotakis. “And I will fight for additional community funding to quickly maintain and upgrade the existing network.”
In the meantime, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched an investigation into a contract for the upgrade of the signaling system and remote control on the Greek railway.
“I can confirm that the EPPO has indeed an ongoing investigation, looking exclusively into possible damages to the financial interests in the EU,” an EPPO spokesperson told POLITICO, without providing any details regarding the “ongoing investigations in order not to endanger their outcome.”
The Greek government quickly announced the formation of an experts’ committee to investigate the deadly train collision, causing strong reactions from the opposition who said the move doesn’t have cross-party approval and aims to take over the judicial investigation.
“It is not possible for the person being audited to be an auditor at the same time,” main opposition party Syriza said in a statement.
One member of the experts’ committee already has resigned.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
Artificial intelligence’s newest sensation — the gabby chatbot-on-steroids ChatGPT — is sending European rulemakers back to the drawing board on how to regulate AI.
The chatbot dazzled the internet in past months with its rapid-fire production of human-like prose. It declared its love for a New York Times journalist. It wrote a haiku about monkeys breaking free from a laboratory. It even got to the floor of the European Parliament, where two German members gave speeches drafted by ChatGPT to highlight the need to rein in AI technology.
But after months of internet lolz — and doomsaying from critics — the technology is now confronting European Union regulators with a puzzling question: How do we bring this thing under control?
The technology has already upended work done by the European Commission, European Parliament and EU Council on the bloc’s draft artificial intelligence rulebook, the Artificial Intelligence Act. The regulation, proposed by the Commission in 2021, was designed to ban some AI applications like social scoring, manipulation and some instances of facial recognition. It would also designate some specific uses of AI as “high-risk,” binding developers to stricter requirements of transparency, safety and human oversight.
The catch? ChatGPT can serve both the benign and the malignant.
This type of AI, called a large language model, has no single intended use: People can prompt it to write songs, novels and poems, but also computer code, policy briefs, fake news reports or, as a Colombian judge has admitted, court rulings. Other models trained on images rather than text can generate everything from cartoons to false pictures of politicians, sparking disinformation fears.
In one case, the new Bing search engine powered by ChatGPT’s technology threatened a researcher with “hack[ing]” and “ruin.” In another, an AI-powered app to transform pictures into cartoons called Lensa hypersexualized photos of Asian women.
“These systems have no ethical understanding of the world, have no sense of truth, and they’re not reliable,” said Gary Marcus, an AI expert and vocal critic.
These AIs “are like engines. They are very powerful engines and algorithms that can do quite a number of things and which themselves are not yet allocated to a purpose,” said Dragoș Tudorache, a Liberal Romanian lawmaker who, together with S&D Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei, is tasked with shepherding the AI Act through the European Parliament.
Already, the tech has prompted EU institutions to rewrite their draft plans. The EU Council, which represents national capitals, approved its version of the draft AI Act in December, which would entrust the Commission with establishing cybersecurity, transparency and risk-management requirements for general-purpose AIs.
The rise of ChatGPT is now forcing the European Parliament to follow suit. In February the lead lawmakers on the AI Act, Benifei and Tudorache, proposed that AI systems generating complex texts without human oversight should be part of the “high-risk” list — an effort to stop ChatGPT from churning out disinformation at scale.
The idea was met with skepticism by right-leaning political groups in the European Parliament, and even parts of Tudorache’s own Liberal group. Axel Voss, a prominent center-right lawmaker who has a formal say over Parliament’s position, said that the amendment “would make numerous activities high-risk, that are not risky at all.”
The two lead Parliament lawmakers are working to impose stricter requirements on both developers and users of ChatGPT and similar AI models | Pool photo by Kenzo Tribouillard/EPA-EFE
In contrast, activists and observers feel that the proposal was just scratching the surface of the general-purpose AI conundrum. “It’s not great to just put text-making systems on the high-risk list: you have other general-purpose AI systems that present risks and also ought to be regulated,” said Mark Brakel, a director of policy at the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI policy.
The two lead Parliament lawmakers are also working to impose stricter requirements on both developers and users of ChatGPT and similar AI models, including managing the risk of the technology and being transparent about its workings. They are also trying to slap tougher restrictions on large service providers while keeping a lighter-tough regime for everyday users playing around with the technology.
Professionals in sectors like education, employment, banking and law enforcement have to be aware “of what it entails to use this kind of system for purposes that have a significant risk for the fundamental rights of individuals,” Benifei said.
If Parliament has trouble wrapping its head around ChatGPT regulation, Brussels is bracing itself for the negotiations that will come after.
The European Commission, EU Council and Parliament will hash out the details of a final AI Act in three-way negotiations, expected to start in April at the earliest. There, ChatGPT could well cause negotiators to hit a deadlock, as the three parties work out a common solution to the shiny new technology.
On the sidelines, Big Tech firms — especially those with skin in the game, like Microsoft and Google — are closely watching.
The EU’s AI Act should “maintain its focus on high-risk use cases,” said Microsoft’s Chief Responsible AI Officer Natasha Crampton, suggesting that general-purpose AI systems such as ChatGPT are hardly being used for risky activities, and instead are used mostly for drafting documents and helping with writing code.
“We want to make sure that high-value, low-risk use cases continue to be available for Europeans,” Crampton said. (ChatGPT, created by U.S. research group OpenAI, has Microsoft as an investor and is now seen as a core element in its strategy to revive its search engine Bing. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.)
A recent investigation by transparency activist group Corporate Europe Observatory also said industry actors, including Microsoft and Google, had doggedly lobbied EU policymakers to exclude general-purpose AI like ChatGPT from the obligations imposed on high-risk AI systems.
Could the bot itself come to EU rulemakers’ rescue, perhaps?
ChatGPT told POLITICO it thinks it might need regulating: “The EU should consider designating generative AI and large language models as ‘high risk’ technologies, given their potential to create harmful and misleading content,” the chatbot responded when questioned on whether it should fall under the AI Act’s scope.
“The EU should consider implementing a framework for responsible development, deployment, and use of these technologies, which includes appropriate safeguards, monitoring, and oversight mechanisms,” it said.
The EU, however, has follow-up questions.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
MOSCOW — As Russia enters the second year of its war against Ukraine, fans of Joseph Stalin are enjoying a renewed alignment with the Kremlin.
On Sunday, the hundreds of Stalinists who came to Red Square to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet dictator’s death were full of bravado and admiration for a man responsible for mass executions, a network of labor camps and forced starvation.
But that was not a side of the dictator that was at the forefront of the minds of those who showed up to commemorate him.
“Stalin stood up to Nazism,” Maxim, a 19-year-old medical student in a blue wooly hat, who like others interviewed for this article declined to give his last name, told POLITICO. “And now our current president has led the charge to take it on again.”
Irina, a 35-year-old marketer, brought a bouquet of red carnations to lay at Stalin’s grave at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. On February 24 last year when President Vladimir Putin declared war on Ukraine, a triumphant Irina posted a picture of a hammer and sickle on Instagram. “That symbol for me said it all.”
Standing in front of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square, longtime Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov told journalists Putin could learn “lessons” from Stalin: “It’s time to take action and start fighting in a real way.”
But as Stalin’s reputation undergoes this rehabilitation, those dedicated to documenting Soviet-era mass repression have felt the full force of the state apparatus used against them.
Across town from Red Square, in Moscow’s north-eastern Basmanny district, about two dozen people gathered outside a faded yellow four-storey building on Sunday. They came to install a plaque commemorating the site as the last home of Vladimir Maslov, an economist accused of spying for Poland in a fabricated case and shot at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge. One of the attendees wore an olive-green jacket adorned with a Dove of Peace — a risky political statement in Putin’s Russia.
The “Last Address” campaign, which attaches the plaques to the former homes of the victims of Soviet repression, is one of very few such projects remaining after a merciless purge of Russia’s most established human rights groups — Memorial, the Sakharov Center and the Moscow Helsinki Group have all been forced to close.
For now, their loosely organized volunteers, armed with drills and step stools to attach the plaques on façades, have been spared. But they face increasing hurdles: The required unanimous consent of a particular building’s residents has become harder to come by; plaques have even been taken down.
“People have become more careful, they are scared that acknowledging the dark episodes of the past will be taken as a nod to what’s going on today,” said volunteer Mikhail Sheinker. “In times like these, past and present converge until they almost blend together.”
The day Stalin’s death was announced — March 6, 1953 — is seared into Sheinker’s memory: “I was four at the time and was making the usual ruckus, but my mother told me to be quiet out of respect.”
Russian Communist party supporters march to lay flowers to the tomb of late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin | Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images
Today, in wartime Russia, the specter of Stalin could once again be used to further silence dissent.
On Sunday, state-run news agency RIA Novosti published an opinion piece headlined: “Stalin is a weapon in the battle between Russia and the West” arguing criticizing Stalin is “not just anti-Soviet but is also Russophobic, aimed at dividing and defeating Russia.”
But while World War II — which Russians refer to as “the Great Patriotic War” — continues to be a central trope of Putin’s rhetoric when it comes to his invasion of Ukraine, the president casts himself more as a successor to the czars than Soviet leaders. Accordingly, state media paid relatively little attention to the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s death.
Former Kremlin adviser Sergei Markov said that’s because Stalin is still too divisive and Russia’s ruling elite is loathe to commit to any specific ideology. But “if Russia is going to suffer further setbacks [in Ukraine], Stalin will become a main theme,” Markov wrote on Telegram.
Strange bedfellows
The alliance between Putin’s Kremlin and revanchist Communists is an uneasy one.
In Russia’s lower house, or the State Duma, the Communist Party closely toes the Kremlin line — but at a regional level, its members are at times less disciplined.
Last month, Mikhail Abdalkin, a Communist lawmaker in the region of Samara, posted a video of himself listening to Putin’s annual address to the entire ruling elite with noodles hanging from his ears. It was a nod to a Russian idiom “hang noodles on one’s ears” that refers to being taken for a ride or being fed nonsense.
A Russian Communist party supporter holds a portrait of late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
Last week, Abdalkin said he had been charged with discrediting Russia’s armed forces, with the case to be heard on March 7. If he’s convicted, Abdalkin could be fined.
On Red Square on Sunday, some Communist supporters volunteered criticism of Putin, too — but not of his war on Ukraine.
“Stalin gets criticized for having blood on his hands. But what about Putin’s policies? Outside big cities, people need to travel hundreds of kilometers on muddy roads to get health care,” said Alexander, a pensioner in his 60s.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
