PETROPAVLOVSK-KAMCHATSKY, December 23. /TASS/. Some of the questions asked at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent end-of-the-year news conference were not actually questions but rather complaints, or even slander, Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with the Moscow. Kremlin. Putin program on the Rossiya-1 television channel on Sunday.
"Naturally, we were sorry to hear some question that had nothing to do with journalism, various complaints. As a matter of fact, they were rather petitions from citizens. These people were not journalists at all and, regrettably, they only used the time of those journalists who wanted to ask their questions."
Moreover, according to Peskov, some information was not true. "As a matter of fact, it can be called slander," he said.
According to the Kremlin spokesman, not all those accredited to the news conference proved to be journalists, hence the format of the event was a sort of mixture of a news conference for the press and a question-and-answer session with people. He said this problem needs to be analyzed not to mix these formats.
Nevertheless, he said it was a "brilliant" news conference. "It is still an unprecedented format. No other global leader can boast of being capable of maintaining such a format of speaking online either with the country’s citizens or with the mass media," Peskov stressed.
Putin’s 14th traditional end-of-the-year news conference took place in Moscow on December 20. A record-breaking number of journalists - 1,702 - were accredited to it.