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Between poverty and slow growth, Russia's economic future uncertain

AFP, Saint Petersburg
OUTSIDE a metro station in Saint-Petersburg, 70-year-old Irina Semyonova is selling homemade tomato-and-aubergine preserves as a way to supplement her pension which she says is just not enough to live on.
After paying her bills and buying medicine, she says only 4,000 rubles ($70/57 euros) are left out of her monthly pension of 12,000 rubles.
"Can one live on 4,000 rubles, especially in an expensive city like Saint-Petersburg?"
Her lifeline is a country house outside the former imperial capital where she grows vegetables in her garden.
"1 go there in the summer, I have a vegetable plot and 1 sell what I grow, which helps me survive," she said.
Vladimir Putin, who is set to win a fourth historic term in March 18 polls, oversaw a period of economic growth during his first two mandates (2000-2008) that boosted personal incomes in the wake of the financial instability of the 1990s when many Russians lost their savings.
But his third stint in the Kremlin, which began in 2012 after four years serving as prime minister, saw a decline in ordinary people's quality of life.
Russia has seen purchasing power decrease continuously for the past four years after the economy was hit with international sanctions punishing Moscow for its annexation of Crimea in 2014 followed by a fall in global oil prices in 2016.
The country's poverty rate, which had fallen from 29 percent in 2000 to 10.7 percent in 2012, inched back up to 13.5 percent in 2016, according to the most recent annual official figures.
In November, the World Bank released a report in which it said less than half of the
population, 46.3 percent, was secure from sinking into poverty - citing a figure which was 10 percent lower than in 2014.
The situation is particularly dire in provincial Russia, where ordinary people subsist on extremely low salaries and young families often have to be helped by retirees' meagre pensions.
"The prices are crazy," said Vyacheslav, a retired mechanic living in Maloyaroslavets, a town in the Kaluga region southwest of Moscow.
"I cannot afford anything."
Tatyana Kuznetsova, 47, who lives in a nearby village of Ilyinskoye, says she already knows her pension will be less than 100 euros when she retires in several years, despite "breaking her back" at work since childhood.
Employed at a fish processing plant, she will
never save enough to replace her sputtering old car, she said bitterly.
According to a study by Credit Suisse bank, the richest 10 percent of Russians control 77 percent of the wealth, placing the country on the same level of inequality as the United States in a ranking of developed countries.
"Between 2000 and 2013 the government didn't need to worry too much about the economy, " said Chris Weafer of Macro Advisory consultancy.
"The combination of annually rising oil wealth, plus the strong growth in disposable income and available credit, almost drove the economy without much government intervention," he said
But the economic model reliant on energy extraction seems to have come to the end of the road, he said.