WILL THE BORDERS BETWEEN RUSSIAN REGIONS BE CLOSED?

The prospect of imposing restrictions on movement between regions for Russian citizens was outlined by the Minister of Health Mikhail Murashko. At one of the "Medicine and Quality" conferences, he recalled that on December 6, the number of people infected with COVID-19 broke a new record - 29,039 people.

Having recognized in his speech that doctors have no chances to change the situation for the better with the help of drugs, the minister suggested considering the possibility of introduction administrative bans on crossing the borders of individual subjects of the Russian Federation, as well as on moving between individual municipalities. The minister's statement was quickly picked up by the media, prompting a flurry of comments on the Internet.

As a result, many authorities, ranging from Murashko's aide Alexei Kuznetsov to the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov, were forced to make corrective statements. Kuznetsov limited himself to pointing out that the phrase of the head of the Ministry of Health about the all-Russian lockdown was taken out of context.

According to him, the ministry has not yet proposed to introduce restrictions of this kind.

Peskov, disagreeing with the opinion of Murashko, said that the authorities did not not plan to introduce restrictions on crossing the borders of the regions, since the existing measures are already sufficient. The spokesman for the head of state explained the lack of need by the fact that the governors and authorities of the Russian regions are already endowed with special powers that allow them to introduce or cancel appropriate bans on the movements of citizens within the country.

It is worth noting that the mass vaccination against coronavirus in Russia has already started last week. However, sources note that the order of Vladimir Putin, announced on December 2, cannot yet be implemented in many Russian regions. The statement of the head of state that up to 2 million doses of the drug will be produced in the nearest future is sinful of inaccurate wording.

Many experts assume that vaccinations in most of the country’s regions will not begin until next year.

At the same time, the priority of vaccinations for pedagogical, medical and social workers, announced at the beginning of the campaign, does not yet allow experts to make a real forecast of the development of the disease for a more or less distant future.