President Vladimir Putin announced today that he supports a proposal to develop federal legislation that would clarify the government’s understanding of “the Russian nation.”

“What we absolutely can and must implement — we need to be thinking about this directly and begin working on this in practical terms — is a law on the Russian nation,” Putin announced on Monday at a meeting of Russia’s Council for Interethnic Relations.

Putin told the council that the government currently lacks a “special structure” to deal with ethnic issues at the national level, according to the Interfax news agency.

“The fundamental question,” Putin said, “is coordination among the different agencies that implement the state’s national policy. There are ten at just the federal level. Add to that the structures at various regional and municipal levels. But cooperation between them is sometimes extremely low, inefficient, and ill-suited to continuous coordination with scientific and expert organizations.”

The president added that he hopes the government’s coordination problems could improve with the help of a “state program” now being developed by his cabinet.