SELIGER, August 30, /ITAR-TASS/. President Vladimir Putin on Friday called for keeping the current demographic situation and improving it, if possible.

“This is an extremely important topic and task - to keep the birth rate we have registered lately,” he said at a youth forum in Seliger, Tver Region.

He said many skeptics had criticised the government’s maternity capital programmes and other measures aimed at raising the birth rate and warned that the money “will go nowhere”.

“But we succeeded and reached the birth rate we had never had in the past 20-30 years, while infant and maternity mortality rates dropped,” Putin said.

“These are very good indicators and we need to keep this pace and, if possible, even increase it,” the president said.