MOSCOW, Dec 30: President Vladimir Putin signed a law on Saturday that will close casinos and slot-machine halls across most of the country in a few years, forcing the establishments that have become a garish feature of the new Russian landscape into a limited number of legal gambling zones.

The bill sailed through the upper parliament house without opposition on Wednesday after passing the lower house a week earlier.

The bill called for the creation of four zones for legal gambling in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, the Primorsky region on the Pacific coast, the Altai region in Siberia and near the southern cities of Krasnodar and Rostov. Casinos and slot-machine operations elsewhere in the country would be banned as of July 1, 2009.

Casinos mushroomed in Russia’s major cities after the collapse of the Soviet Union and slot-machine halls have sprouted throughout the country.—AP