YEKATERINBURG, September 20 (Itar-Tass) — Russian president’s new plenipotentiary representative in the Urals Federal District (UFD) Yevgeny Kuivashev will be introduced to the governors.
The staff of the Urals office of the presidential envoy told Itar-Tass that on Tuesday Yevgeny Kuivashev who on September 6 was appointed RF presidential plenipotentiary representative in the Urals Federal District will be formally introduced to the authorities in the district. First deputy head of the Russian presidential administration Vladislav Surkov will introduce the new envoy.
The plenipotentiary representative and the governors are planned to outline the basic principles of the future joint work and will mark “growth points” in the development of the Urals region.
For Yevgeny Kuivashev this is the first official appearance in the capacity of the plenipotentiary of the Russian president before the leaders of six regions of the Urals.
The UFD is one of the eight federal districts of Russia. The district was established on 13 May 2000 by a decree of the President of Russia. The district is mostly located in the geographical region of Ural, but also includes some parts of the Volga Region; its extent is different from that of the Ural economic region. The administrative centre of the district is Yekaterinburg.
The district covers an area of 1,788,900 square kilometres (690,700 sq mi), that is about 10 percent of Russia, and according to the 2010 Census, had a population of 12,082,700. Of those, 82.74 percent were Russians (10,237,992 people), 5.14 percent Tatars (636,454), 2.87 percent Ukrainians (355,087) and 2.15 percent Bashkirs (265,586). The remainder is comprised by various nationalities of the former Soviet Union. Urban population constituted 79.6 percent. It was mostly concentrated in Yekaterinburg (1,293,537), Chelyabinsk (1,077,174), Tyumen (510,719), Magnitogorsk (418,545), Nizhny Tagil (390,498), Kurgan (345,515) and Surgut (285,027).
In 2006, the district was providing 90 percent of the Russian production of natural gas, 68 percent of oil and 42 percent of the metal products. Industrial production per capita in the district is about 2.5 higher than the average value in Russia. The district provides about 42 percent of the Russian tax incomes, and most of these 42 percent are due to the industry. Its major branches are fuel mining and production (53 percent), metallurgy (24 percent) and metal processing and engineering (8.8 percent). Metal processing and engineering are especially developed in Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk Oblast where their fractions are about 83 percent and 73 percent, respectively. Whereas fuel and mineral mining has been providing a nearly constant outcome between 1990 and 2006, metal processing and engineering are declining, despite they employ up to 30 percent of industry workers of the district. The production of metal-cutting machines, excavators, tractors, bulldozers, buses and steel-making equipment decreased 6–34 times, and manufacturing of household appliances and agricultural equipment almost halted. The fraction of machinery in total industrial products decreased from 20 percent in 1990 to 2.5 percent in 2006. The machinery required for other Ural's industries is mostly imported, at a volume of $1.7 billion per year. More than a third of machinery plants are unprofitable. Among the causes of the decline are lack of local resources and increasing transport prices.