OREANDA-NEWS Russian President Vladimir Putin supported the creation of a special economic zone in the city of Shebekino, Belgorod region. Oksana Kositsyna, director of the Shebeki plant "Allnex Belgorod", addressed him with a corresponding question within the framework of the event "Results of the year with Vladimir Putin".

In a video message, she recalled that many enterprises in the district center (40 thousand people previously lived there) were subjected to a terrorist attack by the armed forces of Ukraine and were destroyed.

"I think that the conditions of the special economic zone in Shebekin and the creation of such a zone there should be supported," Vladimir Putin replied.

I will ask the government to make proposals in the near future.

We need to save jobs there and ensure economic recovery in the near future, including in this area, which you mentioned."

Earlier, the Belgorod region has already tried to create a special economic zone. But now its project has been suspended: Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov noted that the metallurgists, for whose projects the SEZ was planned, "profit volumes have decreased so much that it has become impossible to implement the investment project in the current form in which it was planned." Vladimir Lisin's large-scale NLMK Group project to expand production at Stoilensky GOK in Stary Oskol worth 250 billion rubles was to become the anchor and for the first time the only resident of the SEZ.