Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 24 – In the last 24
hours, more than 60 long-haul truckers joined the strike encampment in Manas in
Daghestan, bringing the total number of trucks parked there to 350 (kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/301557/),
and truckers in Sverdlovsk Oblast said they will send a column of 480 trucks to
Moscow to press their case (ura.ru/news/1052286518).
The
drivers said they chose that number in order to highlight how false was Prime
Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s claim last week that only 480 drivers were taking
part in the job action in Russia as a whole (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/04/russian-truckers-say-600000-drivers-on.html).
Meanwhile,
some Moscow outlets are beginning to acknowledge that despite what Russian
officials are saying, the strike is growing, spreading to ever more regions and
having an ever greater impact on consumers because food and other products
regularly delivered by trucks isn’t reaching the shelves (ng.ru/economics/2017-04-24/4_6980_platon.html).
Indeed, Anastassiya Bashkatova, an
economics reporter for Nezavisimaya
gazeta, adds, the government appears set to make its own problems with the
strikers worse by suggesting that it may impose the Plato fee system not only
on the truckers as current arrangements have it but also on long-distance buses
as well.
If that happens, drivers at some bus
companies could join the strike, and Russians who in many cases rely on bus
travel as an inexpensive means of getting from one place to another will be hit
as well, angering them and possibly putting more pressure on the Moscow regime
to reconsider and back down.
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