Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told...

"We will keep a cautious eye on the situation at the mill, when it restarts operation," Putin said during a meeting on Wednesday with Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev.

"Scientists told me no major ecological changes took place during the decades of the mill"s operation when I visited it last summer. We should, however, monitor the situation closely," he added.

A public campaign to close or convert the mill built in 1966 on the shores of the world"s largest freshwater lake became one of the symbols of Glasnost, the "openness" policy proclaimed by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s.

It involved the nation"s leading statesmen and literary men and forced the Soviet government to promise a halt to pulp production by 1993.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 delayed the decision, and it was only in October 2008 that the plant switched over to a closed water cycle, preventing the discharge of waste into the lake, which is a UNESCO World

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