Five Russian governors resign in one day

According to RT, all these 5 governors will leave their posts at the end of this year, before the election vote area scheduled for September 11.

Two of the governors – Sergey Zhvachkin of the Oblast Siberian Tomsk Oblast and Valery Radaev of the Saratov Oblast Oblast in the Volga Confederation – have served for two consecutive terms and have held the posts for a decade since 2012. Although Russia has passed a law allowing governors to serve more than two consecutive terms in 2021, both have said they will not run for another term at the upcoming election.

Governor of Kirov Oblast province – another region in the Volga federal region – Igor Vasilyev, who has been in office since 2016, said he had asked President Vladimir Putin to resign because he plans to work at “high level”. federal”. Governor Vasilyev previously worked with the State Registry of Russia – the federal agency that deals with issues related to land and real estate.

The other two outgoing governors are Nikolay Lyubimov of the Ryazan Oblast province in central Russia and Alexander Evstifeev, head of the Mari El Republic – an autonomous region of the indigenous Mari people. Both have served as governors since 2017. Mr. Evstifeev also previously served as a judge of the Moscow Regional Commercial Court. Neither of them made public the reasons for their resignation.

President Vladimir Putin signed an executive order appointing acting governors for all five regions. Two of these – Vladimir Mazur (Tomsk Oblast) and Alexander Sokolov (Kirov Oblast) – previously worked with the presidential administration. Mr. Pavel Malkov, who is about to take over Ryazan Oblast from Mr. Lyubimov, was previously the head of Russia’s state statistics service (Rosstat), the body responsible for the national census in 2021.

In Saratov Oblast, Mr. Radaev will be replaced by his deputy, Roman Busargin. The Mari El Republic will be under the interim leadership of Yury Zaitsev, the former head of government of the Russian republic of Kalmykia. All acting governors will have the opportunity to stand for election in September elections in their respective regions.

Although the mass resignations have attracted media attention in Russia, Russian political analysts do not consider it an unusual event.

“Nothing new,” Aleksey Markin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technology, told Interfax news agency. In the past, governors have sometimes announced their resignations before an election if they felt the public’s confidence in them was waning, Mr Markin said. When only one governor resigns, people pay little attention, according to Mr. Markin.