MOSCOW, June 6. /TASS/. The number of questions sent in for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual televised question-and-answer session has exceeded 1.5 million, the organizers of the event reported.
A total of 1,532,674 messages have been received by the program’s call center as of 18:00 Moscow time on June 6. Most people used phones to submit their questions (894,404 questions), while SMS and MMS channels were used 340,000 and 35,000 times respectively. Besides, 165,000 Russians sent in their questions through the program’s website, while more than 55,000 messages were received through the official mobile app (including about 17,500 videos). Over 41,000 questions and more than 2,000 video messages were submitted via the official groups in social networks.
Questions for the program, during which the head of state will answer citizens’ most relevant and interesting queries live, began to come in at 08:00 Moscow time on May 27. The organizers will be collecting questions until the end of the question-and-answer session, which will go on the air at noon Moscow time on June 7.
Putin’s first televised Q&A session took place on December 24, 2001. Later on, the sessions became annual, with the exception of 2004 and 2012. During the first Q&A session in 2001, as many as 400,000 questions were sent to the president, and their number was growing every year, having reached 3.25 million in 2015.