the sender's country (pre-sorting began in China, the largest source of Russian imports), which allows a reduction in the delivery time of international mail. For example, after opening an exchange centre in Yekaterinburg, a parcel from China to Sverdlovsk can be delivered in five days, including all customs clearance. In August 2013 Russian Post had launched its first regional flight in the far eastern Russian republic of Yakutia. The company held a ceremony at Yakutsk Airport to launch its second new airmail plane under a programme to expand links to remote areas, its first being a flight in the Khabarovsk Krai territory on Russia's east coast. Russian Post deputy director general Alexei Skatin said: "The mail must be delivered on time despite the difficult geography of the region. We are starting to improve the postal logistics in the remote regions of Russia". 2014–2018 development program In late October 2013 Prime Minister Medvedev generally approved the Post's development program in a meeting with Minister of Communications Nikolai Nikiforov. Among its goals are to turn the Russian Post from a model of "subsidized postal operator" to "self-sustaining postal business", modernization of its logistics infrastructure and making its work more efficient. Companies will create eight main hubs with automated sorting and direct exchange with each other. The service area of each hub will be about a 700-km radius. The number of branches in the cities will grow, while the placement of new areas will be determined by regulation. In rural areas, there will be new formats of work: "letter carrier plus internal transport," according to the reform. This is expected to reduce the number of unprofitable offices from 14 thousand to about 8.5 thousand, most of which are in rural areas. Also discussed in the draft is non-discriminatory access to the infrastructure of the postal service. In December 2013, the government published its draft Federal Law on Postal Communications, which is expected to be approved in Spring of 2014. In that year Russian Post was to begin deploying a unified ERP system — a set of integrated applications that allows creation of a single environment to automate planning, accounting, control and analysis of all core business operations across the enterprise. In September 2013 Deputy Minister of Communications Mikhail Evrayev said that one of the major problems of the Russian Post was the lack of a unified information system working both at the central