Ukraine is going through a difficult time. There is nothing extraordinary of the resignation of the Ukrainian government ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections

After all, despite the scandalous behavior of one and, by the way, the other candidate [they are both , Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, scandalous in their own ways], they are smart, they are really smart and they are aware of the leverages they should use to make the voters in the United States understand them, feel them and hear them.

There is no need to distract the attention of the community from the essence of the subject substituting it with secondary questions dealing with the search of those who did it [hacker's attacks].

Terrorists are always a threat to someone. If we'll be scared of them, it means they have won. But that doesn't mean we can have a devil-may-care attitude toward this threat. We must do everything to stop these threats and not give the terrorists a single chance to demonstrate their brutality and hatred of mankind.

I remember my very first encounter with Japan. At that time, I was Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg. Out of nowhere, Japan's Consul General in St Petersburg came to my office and said Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs wanted to invite me to Japan. I was very surprised because I had nothing to do with Japan except being a judoka. This was an opportunity to visit Tokyo and a couple of other cities. And, you know, a capital is a capital everywhere: there is the official script and certain protocol. It is always easier to talk in the provinces, the conversation is more natural.

We would like to see science and higher education developing here [on the Russian Far East], so that it could become one of the major research centres in the entire APR system. Undoubtedly a lot remains to be done here, but given the labour market demand, the relevance of such a university is undeniable.

It is true that the role of the state in the Russian economy may be too big today, but from the fiscal standpoint, it is not always practical to do this in a falling market.