MOSCOW, April 14. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s traditional televised question-and-answer session will take place later this year, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.

"We expect that it will take place [this year] but no timeframe has been set yet," he said. "We will make an announcement [in due course]," Peskov added.

He declined to comment on media reports about the rescheduling of events slated to take place in early June at Moscow’s Gostiny Dvor venue, near Red Square, or whether such changes pertained to plans for holding the presidential Q&A session. "I can’t tell you anything; you should ask the venue’s owners about it," the Russian presidential spokesman noted.

Putin’s question-and-answer session, dubbed "The Direct Line," is a traditional call-in program that gives the chief executive a platform for fielding a diverse range of questions directly from the Russian public in a live broadcast. The program was piloted in 2001 and has been held every year since, except for 2004 and 2012. In 2020, elements of the Direct Line program were incorporated into Putin’s annual press conference. In 2021, Putin’s Q&A session was held on June 30. In 2022, the event did not take place.