Just about every Russian leader for the past several hundred years has at one point or another felt compelled to weigh in on the country’s national pastime, drinking. For some observers, it’s a bit of a mystery why they bother, as these efforts have failed to make much progress in battling this deadly problem. Perhaps in response to the recent report from The Lancet which found that alcohol kills more Russians than war, President Dmitry Medvedev has recently weighed in, expressing his bewilderment as to why Russians are drinking even more today than they did in the dark 1990s, when evil oligarchs ruled the land instead of the enlightened rulers of more recent times.

Medvedev’s radical solution to the problem? At a recent meeting with the Minister of Health, the head of state boldly declared that “A corresponding programme needs to be prepared and certain measures adopted in this direction.”  Given that the second most popular brand of vodka in Russia bears the name of the prime minister (the president’s brand doesn’t sell that well), the authorities may require something more than this along the lines of preventative education efforts.

The other topic of conversation, as reported by our favorite Kremlin mouthpiece, RBK Daily, was the (closely related) ongoing demographic crisis in the country. The minister modestly called an eyebrow-raising 28.3% reduction in mortality “a positive tendency“, while the president sent a loud and clear message to the people that “crisis or no crisis, you’ve got to create a family“, before blowing his own horn a bit by lauding the praises of one of the “national projects” that he had been in charge of before assuming his current post.

Here’s our exclusive translation of the entire piece as posted on the RBK website.