For the third year in a row, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not send New Year's greetings to American President Joe Biden and the leaders of other major unfriendly Western countries.
Putin traditionally congratulates his foreign colleagues on New Year and Christmas in the last days of December. Today, the Kremlin has published a list of leaders who have received such telegrams from the President of the Russian Federation. Putin congratulated:
President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev,
Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturian,
Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan,
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko,
President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev,
President of Kyrgyzstan Sadyr Japarov,
President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon,
President of Turkmenistan Serdar Berdimuhamedov,
President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev,
the President of South Ossetia Alan Gagloev,
Brazilian President Lulu da Silva,
Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orban,
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro,
General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam To Lam,
Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi,
President of the People's Republic of China Xi Jinping,
Chairman of the State Affairs of the DPRK Kim Jong-un,
President of Cuba Miguel Bermudez,
the President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega,
Pope Francis
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic,
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa.
In addition, congratulatory telegrams were sent to a number of former foreign heads of state and government, in particular, Raul Castro, Robert Kocharyan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Serzh Sargsyan, Gerhard Schroeder.
Among those to whom congratulations are sent, there are no leaders of Great Britain, Germany, the USA, France, Japan and other major states unfriendly to Russia.