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Russians name Putin politician of the year — poll

Among the main domestic events of the outgoing year, Russians named the pension reform and the launch of the Crimean Bridge’s railway section

© Alexei Nikolsky/Russia's presidential press service/TASS

MOSCOW, December 26. /TASS/. Nearly half of respondents named President Vladimir Putin politician of the year in a survey by the Russia Public Opinion Research Center VTsIOM, obtained by TASS on Thursday.

"Vladimir Putin, mentioned by 46% of respondents, remains the politician of the year for Russians. He is trailed, far behind, by [Foreign Minister] Sergey Lavrov (15%), [Defense Minister] Sergei Shoigu (10%), [LDPR party leader] Vladimir Zhirinovsky (7%), [Prime Minister] Dmitry Medvedev (6%)," the survey says.

Among the country’s most popular athletes are MMA fighters Khabib Nurmagomedov (7%) and brothers Alexander and Fyodor Yemelyanenko (4% each), figure skaters Alina Zagitova (7%) and Yevgenia Medvedeva (4%), footballer Artyom Dzyuba (6%).

Among the main domestic events of the outgoing year, Russians named the pension reform (10%) and the launch of the Crimean Bridge’s railway section (4%).

The list of main international events includes the improvement of the situation in Syria (9%), presidential election in Ukraine (3%) and Putin’s meeting with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky during the Normandy Quartet summit in Paris (3%).

As the main scandals of the year, Russians named doping scandal and penalties for Russian athletes (7% each), as well as corruption and pension reform (4% each).

The three main victories of 2019 are figure skating (7%), events in Syria (5%) and the Crimean bridge’s rail section launch (2%).

The telephone-based survey was conducted by VTsIOM-SPUTNIK in November-December 2019. It involved 1,600 stationary and mobile phone numbers, picked up by the two-staged stratified random sampling method from the full list of phone numbers in Russia. With the possibility of 95%, the margin of error does not exceed 2.5%.

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