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Russian president, PM visit Sochi centre for talented children

SOCHI, May 16. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev have visited an educational centre for gifted and talented Russian children built at the Azimuth Hotel in the Imereti Valley of the Black Sea resort of Sochi, the venue of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

"Putin and Medvedev have inspected the buildings equipped as educational facilities," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Saturday.

Earlier, Peskov said: "It is his personal initiative, the president’s pet project meant for talented children who will be offered classes in three basic areas: science, arts and sports," adding that the president is in the habit of "using his stay in Sochi to call at this centre" to see the state of things there.

In early February, Putin offered to create an educational centre to bring together gifted and talented young athletes, school students highly-able at physics and maths, musicians and dancers from across the country.

He said conditions should be created so that children could study there for six months. Putin sees this as a first stage in the search for gifted children, who would then remain in the focus of attention up until their job placement.

The Russian president has stayed in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi since May 12. Over this period, he held a series of government meetings on defence-related subjects, met with visiting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Abkhazian President Raul Khadzhimba. Apart from that, he accepted resignation of the governors of Russia’s Omsk, Irkutsk, Leningrad and Kostroma regions and the Kamchatka Territory and appointed them acting heads of regions till the next elections in September.

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