On Wednesday, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev held a meeting over the preparations to the Sochi Olympics. The prime minister stated a high level of preparedness of sport facilities and criticized the quality of motor roads. Medvedev noted that the Olympics “are getting closer to its homestretch.”
The run-up to the Olympics in Sochi entered “its homestretch”, and the level of preparedness “is generally high,” Dmitry Medvedev said after his inspection of the Sochi Olympic sites, the Kommersant daily reported. Several Olympic sites in the Imereti Valley evoked critical remarks from the prime minister, at which “this does not seem to us that they are ready by 85%, as it is reported usually.”
A shower of criticism from the prime minister was levied on the transport and energy authorities. Deputy Minister of Transport Nikolai Asaul was slammed for “a merely horrible condition” of a by-pass highway in Sochi from time to time. The prime minister asked Deputy Minister of Energy Andrei Cherezov whether he can guarantee that there will be no power outages during the Olympics. Cherezov, who was appointed at this post a month ago, replied that the ministry “will take all the efforts” for this.
At the very end of the meeting Dmitry Medvedev proposed to Kozak to think over the creation of a scope of bonuses for the builders, particularly grant a privileged credit rate for those, “who are working well and proved that they honor their liabilities on time.”
The Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily noted that the prime minister set high requirements for the Olympic city of Sochi not only for a period of time forthcoming competitions will be held. “When will the main highway, which is running through Sochi, be built?” Dmitry Medvedev asked an official of the transport ministry. “You should do all for a relief road and the main highway. The current condition of the road is not acceptable for Sochi or any other big city,” the prime minister noted.
Medvedev demanded that all Olympic sites should be accepted from the subcontractors only if they are done with the high quality, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported. Those subcontractors, who worked well and did not let us down, the prime minister offered cheap credits as a bonus.
The Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily recalled that the disruption of the construction schedules and underdeveloped infrastructure in the region were recently considered as the most pressing problems for the Sochi Olympics.
Ahead of the Olympics the indicators of one more problem related with the enactment of the law on the ban of homosexuality propaganda among adolescents in Russia appeared. On Tuesday, U.S. President Barack Obama criticized the Russian law on the ban for the gay propaganda, but noted that the law will not affect the holding of the Sochi Olympics. The German justice minister also raised the issue over Russian anti-gay laws.
The Russian leadership noted this fact and on Wednesday Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak in comments on the statement over the need to observe the rights of representatives of the gay community during the Winter Olympic Games pledged that there is no encroachment and will be no encroachment on the rights of sexual minorities either during or after the Olympics in Sochi. “No infringement will be made on the sexual minorities at the Olympics, before the Olympics and after the Olympics. The legislation does not envisage this,” he said.
Kozak also finds the appeals to boycott the Olympics as “just private opinions” over the law on the ban of homosexuality propaganda among underage children enacted in Russia.