GORKI, February 1. /TASS/. Deputy Chief of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev has said that the year 2020 was very special for him following transfer to his current position and also a year of strenuous efforts due to the coronavirus pandemic that swept the world.
During the interview Medvedev granted to Russian media journalists recalled his transfer to a new position in the Russian political establishment - the post of Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council. The interviewers asked Medvedev to look back on last year, to brief them on what was accomplished during that period and what crucial tasks he was faced with today. "I would avoid uttering banalities, everybody is aware that last year was very tight," Medvedev replied.
He explained that he was referring not to his transfer to another job, but to the "novel coronavirus pandemic the world has been and is still struggling with." "This largely determined the development scenario for most countries, including ours, and the response to threats," he explained. "Response with the means that are at the disposal of the Security Council."
Medvedev pointed to the fact that the pandemic-related issues were brought to the forefront of the Security Council’s activities alongside the struggle against standard threats that always face any country and work for maintaining strategic stability. For this, special mechanisms were created, including "commissions, resolutions, recommendations and reports that the Security Council usually presents to the head of state."
"On the other hand, it is quite obvious that last year was very special for me, because I was busy with somewhat different things," he added. "I would not say that they were totally new for me, because I had to handle the same problems in my previous capacities, when he was in charge of the presidential staff and later, during his presidential term. "For this reason, on the list of my duties I saw nothing fundamentally new, something totally unfamiliar to me," Medvedev said. "But the list of tasks to be handled did not get shorter."
He recalled that the Security Council "was created in fact to help the president perform his constitutional duties in the field of security and resistance to different threats." "I hope that this agency has coped with its tasks by and large. This is what my job looked like throughout 2020," Medvedev concluded.