Government meeting

The agenda includes expanding the list of essential medications, support for civilian shipbuilding, additional measures to combat cyber fraud, and increasing salaries for public sector workers.

Mikhail Mishustin's opening remarks:

Good afternoon, colleagues.

Before we get to our agenda today, I would like to inform you about an important decision.

It concerns the affordability of medicines on the List of Vital and Essential Medicines.

We regularly update this list. At the beginning of this year, we added 18 medicines to it. Today, we will expand it by another eight medicines for anaemia, neutropenia, recurrent pericarditis, tuberculosis, and various malignant tumours.

Altogether, the list includes over 800 medicines, and most of them are domestically produced medicines, which is extremely important.

In the next five years, the share of domestically produced vital and essential medicines must be increased to 90 percent. This is the goal of the relevant national project and the Strategy for Healthcare Development until 2030, which has recently been approved by a presidential executive order.

We must continue to do everything in our power so that our citizens, especially those with life-threatening diagnoses and diseases, have access to vital medicines.

I will now speak about support for several industries, including for shipbuilding and shipyards.

The President always highlights this issue. As per his instructions, we are implementing a programme of low-interest leasing of civilian vessels, which provides for building bulk carriers, container ships and large cruise and pleasure boats and catamarans, including electric, hydrofoil and other innovative models.

We will allocate 5 billion roubles this year for extending this programme. Overall, 10 billion roubles have been allocated for building over 70 passenger vessels in the past two years, which will be put into operation on low-interest conditions under lease programmes.

This will ensure guaranteed contracts which our shipyards will use to modernise their production facilities and apply advanced competencies. We will be able to modernise Russia's passenger and cargo fleets, which will make river and sea travel, including tourism, more comfortable. This will also strengthen the regions' connectivity and help create the foundation for their economic growth.

We have one more issue on the agenda of the Government meeting today - on assistance to civilian shipbuilding. Acting at the initiative of the head of our state, we will discuss the allocation of 1.36 billion roubles for this purpose.

These funds will be used to compensate part of the cost of building four fishing vessels at shipyards in the Far Eastern Federal District. These vessels have been built and will be used to catch crabs under the investment quota mechanism.

It is not the first year that we will provide this support. It helps simultaneously fulfil several important tasks, primarily, modernise our fishing fleet, increase processing and enhance production efficiency.

Of course, this will also allow us to develop national shipbuilding, which is necessary for ensuring our technological sovereignty and creating supply-side economics.

More to be posted soon.