MOSCOW, September 20. /TASS/: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu will take it upon themselves to announce what they will do with the lawmaker mandates they won in the State Duma (lower house of parliament) elections, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday.
"This will be their personal decisions," he said when asked about their next steps.
Peskov stressed that President Vladimir Putin speaks to the ministers "regularly and constantly about working matters." "I don’t have the information whether they have notified the president but in any case they will reveal their decisions themselves," the spokesman stressed.
Sergey Perminov, a high-ranking United Russia party member, earlier told TASS that the decisions about allocating State Duma mandates in the party are yet to be made and that the consultations were still underway.
At the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin, following the June 19 United Russia party congress, the federal part of the party’s list included Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, chief physician of Moscow’s Kommunarka hospital Denis Protsenko, co-chair of the central headquarters of the All-Russia People's Front Yelena Shmeleva and children's rights commissioner Anna Kuznetsova.
United Russia is currently projected to win 49.63% of the votes in the State Duma party lists with 95.05% of the voting results processed.
