Putin submitted Gromov as a candidate for consideration to legislators in the Moscow Region. Currently his term expires in December 2008. The Moscow Region's legislature will consider the presidential proposal May 4, a spokesman said Wednesday.
"Unless there is force majeure, the Moscow Region Duma will hold an emergency meeting at 11:00 a.m. (Moscow time) May 4 to consider Gromov's candidacy," the source said.
A person with a military background, Gromov was first deputy interior minister of the Soviet Union in 1990-1991. From December 1991, he was deputy commander-in-chief of the Russian Ground Forces, and Russia's deputy defense minister from June 1992 through March 1995. In December 1995 Gromov was elected member of the State Duma (parliament's lower house), but resigned January 13, 2000, when he was first elected governor of the Moscow Region. Gromov was re-elected for another term in 2003, and joined the board of Russia's State Council in December 2003.
On April 23, legislators in the Krasnodar Territory in southern Russia approved Governor Alexander Tkachev for a new term in office by a unanimous majority at an emergency meeting. Tkachev, whose current term expires in March 2009, a year after the presidential election, asked the president for a vote of confidence on April 10. In a maneuver designed to secure a presidential endorsement for a second term, another governor, Valentina Matviyenko of St. Petersburg, near the end of her first term last December submitted her resignation to President Vladimir Putin and also asked for a vote of confidence.
