MOSCOW, December 22. /TASS/. The questions for Russian President Vladimir Putin's annual press conference are not written out in advance, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov asserted. That said, he noted that the Kremlin can forecast the subjects that may interest journalists.
"The questions cannot be written out ahead of time because they [foreign media outlets] also participate [in the annual press conference] and they also ask the president [questions]. So, if they think that their questions were written out in advance, they are all easily predictable," the Kremlin official said in an interview with the Russia-24 TV channel when responding to a remark that some foreign media outlets insist that the questions for Putin’s annual press conference are prepared in advance.
The spokesman explained that the Kremlin "tracks the agenda during the year especially when it is as unstable as now, so alarming in some aspects, so unstable in other aspects, and at the same time promising in other aspects."
"All of this is very easy to forecast," he said. "When our experts, when the government’s administration prepare reference materials for the president, we are predicting all these subjects and very often hit the mark," Putin’s press secretary noted.
The Kremlin official explained that due to certain requirements by the Russian sanitary watchdog, the annual press conference will be held at Manezh and not at Moscow’s World Trade Center (WTC).
"Because the hall is smaller at the WTC," he explained. He told the TV channel that according to the sanitary watchdog, "a certain distance should be observed between the rows, between every seat occupied by reporters and between these rows and the president" so a larger hall was selected to ensure all sanitary preventive measures are observed since "the number one issue is the security of the president’s health."
Among other new features of the upcoming December 23 press conference, the Kremlin official named a lower number of accredited media representatives. "Unfortunately, there are fewer reporters, we are limited by a figure of 500, usually we had up to 1,200 journalists so now it’s half of what we had before but still." According to him, "the rest will remain [as usual], it’s a classic press conference, the president’s annual press conference with the free agenda, free questions and exhaustive answers by the head of state."
Putin has been meeting with journalists at large annual press conferences since 2001, there was a pause when he was Russian Prime Minister from May 2008 to May 2012. The first seven press conferences were held in the Kremlin and then were moved to the WTC. In 2020, due to the restrictions over the coronavirus pandemic, Putin answered questions from his Novo-Ogaryovo residence in the Moscow Region.