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Kremlin spokesman expects Putin’s upcoming conference to be ‘special’

The annual news conference by Russian President Vladimir Putin will be held in Moscow on Thursday

MOSCOW, December 14. /TASS/. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov believes that Thursday’s annual news conference by Russian President Vladimir Putin will be a special one.

"The interest to this conference is huge, and this news conference will be special. Now that the current presidential term is about to expire and we know that Putin will run in the upcoming presidential elections, it [the conference] will probably be even more significant than the 2012 news conference, when Putin was elected president again," he said.

The spokesman said he expected many questions about the electoral process and elections in general to be voiced during the media event.

The annual news conference by Russian President Vladimir Putin will be held in Moscow on Thursday. Since 2001, Putin has been annually holding news conferences, with a break when he served as prime minister between May 2008 and May 2012.

A record-setting number of journalists - 1,640 - has been accredited to this year’s event.

The Russian president traditionally convenes his annual news conference in winter to sum up the outgoing year’s results. The conference has no time limits. The shortest of these news conferences lasted for 1 hour and 33 minutes back in 2001. The 2008 news conference set the record as being the longest one, lasting for 4 hours and 40 minutes.

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