Cyrill Vatomsky, Where All Politics Are Global

There is still no resolution for the eight day ban on medical specimen exports from Russia and some 100,000 patients in have been affected, according to Gazeta.ru:

These are people taking part in two-year clinical tests. In their cases we are talking about hours. 8 days, 200 hours, doctors have to cancel visits

Kommersant offers a list of 17 children that have been saved by the program which the Russian President doubts there were any need for at all. Gazeta.ru also quotes an anonymous source from clinical therapy field:

We already have 17 women with breast cancer and 14 HIV infected patients that do not receive adequate therapy.

Government officials have been promising a speedy resolution. I have reported on last week's promises from Mr. Belyannikov, The Federal Customs Head. Nothing happened since. More from Gazeta.ru: 

On Tuesday evening, Mikhail Zurabov, Deputy Minister of Heath Care and Social Development stated that the problem with export of medical specimen from Russia would be resolved "within hours". According to Zurabov, a joint directive from Federal Customs Service and Ministry of Health Care and Social Development would outline the regulatory process of obtaining export permissions. This however would only apply to clinical samples related to actual treatment, not clinical tests.

Needless to say, nothing has happened within hours yet. Claiming to have enough time to ponder, the good minister decided he had a couple of weeks to come up with regulations pertaining to export of clinical test samples. Also according to the same article in the Gazeta.ru, even deputy chair of the State Duma Committee on Science and Education is in the dark:

We are still in information vacuum. Nobody has seen the actual text of the ban. It has never been published. We do not know who issued it and what its Issue Number was,  while the Customs Service adheres to it nonetheless.

There is apparently an internal struggle going on and probably within the top echelons of Russian state power. Kommersant notes an interesting quote from Mr. Putin's Friday interview to international mass media where he also threatened Europe with missiles and compared himself with Mahatma Ghandi. When someone did ask Russian President about the medical specimen export ban, his reply was, at best strange:

"Если вы говорите, что эти образцы вывозятся для того, чтобы оказать людям какую-то помощь, у меня, конечно, возникает вопрос: кому и какую помощь до сих пор оказали? Есть такая статистика? У меня такой статистики нет. И вообще, у меня сомнения, что кому-то оказана какая-то конкретная помощь после вывоза каких-то биоматериалов"

If you are saying that these specimens are exported in order to provide people with some help, I naturally have a question: what kind of help has been provided so far and to whom? Is there any statistical data? I do not have any. In general, I doubt there has ever been any specific help provided to anyone based on export of some bio samples.

I think this is the most revealing quote and it actually points directly to where this ban came from and why is it so difficult to resolve it. This ban is the product of the retrograde, paranoid and ignorant mentality of FSB/KGB apparatchiks. There is no other explanation anymore. Now, with such an abysmal competency level, do we still want to believe that Kremlin would never have anything to do with Litvinenko murder because it did nothing but hurt it? They would never do something like that to themselves, would they?

Putin's government seems to become the epitome of gross miscalculations.