Million rubles for PR

At least that much was paid by the Russian taxpayer for the whim of a non-fan of Medvedev to attend the qualifying match between Slovenia and Russia.

To see the game with the Slovenians live, the presidential team made a detour with a total flight duration of four hours. What is the point of making such “air loops” over Europe?

Judging by television footage, the president is not a big football fan. And he didn’t show any emotion to the TV viewers at the game. Except that towards the end of the match I changed my light gray jacket to a warmer and more noticeable red one...

The spontaneity of the arrival even affected the fact that the president did not really communicate with the team. Neither before, nor after, nor in the middle of the match, when such a meeting would be somewhat logical.
“Maybe they would have played differently,” football fans on Internet forums are annoyed.

It is obvious that Medvedev was counting on a winning scenario and was unable to cope well with the loss. All that remains is to estimate how much this hook cost the Russian taxpayer.
“The Presidential IL-96-300-VIP consumes 7 tons of fuel per hour,” technical data from Ilyushin Finance told Interlocutor.

If you calculate 4 hours of flight for two planes (the presidential plane always flies in tandem with a reserve one - just in case), you get 56 tons of kerosene, which at today's prices costs more than a million rubles.

“The Russian delegation did not pay anything directly at the stadium; they received guest tickets,” the Slovenian Football Association told Interlocutor.

A similar story “in the air” recently occurred in the United States, when the Senate discredited American President Obama, who flew to New York for a Broadway play, as he had long promised this to his wife Michelle. And although Obama used the smallest Boeing from the presidential fleet, congressmen estimated his whim at 72 thousand budget dollars thrown down the drain. In our country such a “debriefing” is hardly possible.

By the way

Dmitry Medvedev attended the matches of our football team only twice. But on the most important ones: the first time he came to Luzhniki, where our team hosted the Germans, the second time he flew to Slovenia from Stockholm, straight from the Russia-EU summit. Both times the Russian team lost to their opponents with a score of 0:1. Maybe Vladimir Putin should still be seated at decisive sporting events? By the way, we won the home match with Slovenia, where GDP was present (2:1).