Jakarta. President-Elect Prabowo Subianto recently told Russian President Vladimir Putin to help Indonesia solve its medical doctor shortage.

Prabowo is going on a tour to meet world leaders ahead of his inauguration in October with Russia being the most recent stop. Putin hosted Prabowo at the Grand Kremlin Palace on Wednesday local time. Former general Prabowo currently still serves as Indonesia’s defense minister, making the topic of arms industry cooperation a subject matter that his bilateral meetings always touch upon. But apart from the usual defense cooperation talks, the recent meeting saw Prabowo nudging Putin to accept Indonesian youth to study medicine in Moscow as doctors were in short supply in the Southeast Asian country.

“I plan to initiate a massive scholarship program to send our students outside Indonesia, especially for medical training. Because we are short of 160,000 doctors,” Prabowo told Putin during the broadcasted bilateral meeting.

“So we would like to, if possible, send some of our young boys and girls to study in Russian universities, technical colleges,” Prabowo said, adding that he planned on allocating a “special budget” for this scholarship program.

“We look to Russia as one of our main countries that we would like to send our young boys and girls to study.” 

Prabowo also claimed that Indonesia had many of its young people to study in Russia back in the 1960s. 

This was not the first time that Prabowo talked of Indonesia's doctor shortage. He also spoke of it at the presidential election debate earlier this year, during which he promised to grant scholarships to 10,000 gifted high school graduates to study medicine abroad.