In March 2009, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered the Finance Ministry to initiate an agreement on financial assistance to Abkhazia and South Ossetia.[8] Russia would allocate 8.5 billion rubles to South Ossetia in order to assist in rebuilding housing, social amenities and utilities damaged during the war.[9] According to Eduard Kokoity, seventy percent of residential housing and eighty percent of administrative buildings in Tskhinval were destroyed in the Georgian shelling of the city in 2008.[10]