YEREVAN, JUNE 26, ARMENPRESS: ex- Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov dies, source said.
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Primakov was named prime minister in September 1998, a month after Russian Federation defaulted on $40 billion of domestic debt.
Prior to that, Primakov headed the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) between 1991 and 1996 and served as foreign minister between 1996 and 1998.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that President Vladimir Putin had been informed of Primakov’s death and was deeply saddened, but gave no other details.
“It was Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov who formulated a principle of multipolarity which has proven it has no alternative today”.
“It is a paradox but having elected pro-Western and pro-market Putin, we ended up being much more anti-Western than we would have been had we elected Primakov”.
As the global drumbeat for war against Iraq increased in 1990, Mr Gorbachev sent Mr Primakov as envoy to Iraq, drawing on his deep knowledge of the Middle East. He was said by some to be the outsider whom Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein knew best and trusted the most.
Along with Mikhail Gorbachev, Primakov was considered one of the last of the Soviet-era political titans, and his mid-flight turnaround is seen as a watershed moment in Russia’s foreign policy after Moscow’s rapprochement with Washington following the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Russia’s top diplomat, he was regarded as a firm but pragmatic supporter of Russian interests as the country agonized over its loss of superpower status. He worked hard to dilute the United States’ perceived unilateral dominance of world affairs.
In protest at NATO’s offensive in Serbia, Primakov aborted his March 1999 trip to the U.S.to seek financial support from the global Monetary Fund. Yeltsin fired him in May, as Primakov gained popularity and backed investigations into claims the president’s family took bribes.
Putin nonetheless continued to tap on Primakov’s expertise in tackling global crises.
The president said Primakov had made a “colossal contribution to the formation of modern Russian Federation”. Mr. Primakov also was among those who tried to mediate with Chechen terrorists who seized a Moscow theater and hundreds of hostages in 2002.
Yevgeny Maximovich Primakov was born on October 29, 1929, in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, and grew up with his mother in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Primakov also continued to wield considerable influence as the chairman of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, a Russian business advocacy group, the post he held from 2001 to 2011. After graduating as an Arabic scholar from the Moscow Institute for Oriental Studies in 1953, he became a correspondent for state radio and television and worked in the Middle East in the 1960s.
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A highly decorated New York City police officer before his political career, Biaggi was first elected to the House in 1968 from a Bronx district later redrawn to include a portion of Yonkers. He married his second wife, Irina, a doctor, seven years later. His son, Alexander, died of a heart attack at age 27 during a May Day parade in Moscow in 1981.
