Russia: After the APEC Summit · Global Voices
The 2012 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vladivostok has come and gone. What remains is discussion of what APEC means to Russia’s Far East and the country as a whole. Russian bloggers have reacted to the same handful of media reports and commentaries. They focus more on the summit's cost and benefit to Russia than its politics. 534
Bloggers’ biggest issue, however, was President <PERSON>'s promise to send some APEC volunteers on a cruise to Japan, who went, and who did not.
Commentary online seems to orbit a handful of incendiary items publicized by the mainstream media. NewsRu.com, for instance, published a compilation [ru] of other outlets describing Russia as Asia's raw materials appendage, begging the question: does Russia have anything but national resources to offer China and other Asian economies? NewsRu also retransmitted <PERSON> suggestion that Moscow could share the luxurious lifestyle of its ruling class with its guests in Vladivostok.
Official banner from Russia's APEC Center site. Public domain.
The BBC Russian Service concluded [ru] that, because it's dwarfed by Asia's economic powers, Russia is not really serious about reorienting itself toward its depopulated Far East. That hesitation to advance eastward in turn fuels the public's doubts about how effective it was to spend two-thirds of a trillion rubles updating the region's infrastructure for the summit.
In an article for Novaya Gazeta, <PERSON> declared [ru] that the Kremlin was determined to impress, even though APEC is neither necessary nor useful to Russia. However, her op-ed hits hardest when it asks:
Вопрос: что подумают бизнесмены и выборные чиновники этих стран, когда они приезжают во Владивосток, и только фейерверки для них обходятся в 7 млн долларов? (А сам бесполезный и пустой саммит, повторю, стоит 18 млрд долларов.) Что они подумают, когда узнают, что власть, которая не может построить шоссе от Москвы до Владивостока для собственных избирателей, выложила 2 млрд долларов, чтобы впечатлить заморских гостей мостом на остров Русский? И что Путин по дороге на саммит возглавил стаю стерхов?
A question: what do the businessmen and elected officials of these countries think when they travel to Vladivostok, and fireworks for them alone cost 7 million dollars? (And the useless and empty summit itself, I repeat, costs 18 billion dollars.) What do they think when they learn that the authorities, which cannot build a highway from Moscow to Vladivostok for their own voters, invested 2 billion dollars to impress its foreign guests with a bridge to Russkiy Island? And that <PERSON> led a flock of white cranes on his way to the summit?
The bridge to Russkiy Island. 880