Russian Federation Council leader begins Vietnam visit
(VOV) - Valentina Ivanovna Matviyenko, Chairwoman of the Russian Federation Council, arrived in Hanoi on November 13, beginning her official two-day visit to Vietnam.
Matviyenko is accompanied by Ilyas Umakhanov, the council’s Deputy Chairman; Vladimir Dzhabarov, First Deputy Chairman of the Council’s Committee for International Affairs; Andrey Yurievich Molchanov, Chairman of the Council’s Committee on Economic Policy; other senior officials of the Council; as well as Viktor Kosourov, President of the Russia-Vietnam parliamentary friendship group.
Valentina Matviyenko was born in 1949 in Ukraine. In 1972 she graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Chemistry and Pharmaceutics.
She pursued her career in the Leningrad Young Communist League and district CPSU Committee and became Deputy Chair of the Executive Committee of the Leningrad City Council in 1986.
In 1989 she was elected deputy to the Soviet Parliament, subsequently chairing the Soviet Supreme Council Committee for Women, Families, Maternity, and Childhood. In March 2003 she was appointed Representative Plenipotentiary of the President of the Russian Federation in the North-Western Federal District of the Russian Federation and became the Governor of Saint Petersburg seven months later.
Matviyenko was elected Chairperson of the Council of the Federation in the Russian Federal Assembly in September 2011.
The Chairwoman has been decorated with various awards Orders of Merit for the Fatherland (1999, 2009, and 2003), Order of Honour (1996) Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1981), and Order of the Badge of Honour (1976).