MOSCOW, December 19. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold a televised question-and-answer session to sum up the results of the outgoing year.
The event, headlined 'Results of the Year,' will again combine his hotline TV show and a large press conference. It will begin at noon Moscow time (9:00 a.m. GMT) on Friday.
Picture of the day
The event will be held again in Moscow’s main exhibition hall Gostiny Dvor, where hundreds of journalists, including foreigners, will gather. "It’s in our interests to make it so that the whole world hears what Putin says," Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
Live broadcasts from Russian regions, used in previous editions of the program, are not expected this time. However, everyone has a chance to address the president, as only a smartphone is required to do so.
To date, more than 2,100,000 questions have come in via different channels. Calls to the call center account for the majority of all requests from citizens, with the second most popular way to contact the president being a chatbot in the Max messenger, which was tested for the first time this year. The questions are already being processed by relevant ministries and the president himself.
Speaking about which issues end up "in the president's folder," Peskov told reporters that the head of state still receives a random selection of questions. "But we are trying to give him the whole picture, the whole palette," he said.
According to the Kremlin, social security issues are often mentioned in letters to the president. Often, people raise the question of special operation participants and their family members. However, compared to previous years, the number of questions on the subject has declined. The number of complaints about the healthcare sector is also lower than before. "Many systemic problems have been resolved," the presidential spokesman said.
The flow of incoming questions is being processed by Sber’s GigaChat neural network, whose capacities allow combining millions of requests into a comprehensive picture of the day.
Combined format
Earlier, the Direct Line TV show and a large press conference were hold separately. During the first show, the president communicated with citizens, answering to their letters, text messages, phone calls and live broadcasts from regions. During the second one, he took Russian and foreign journalists’ questions. Since 2001, a total of 18 Direct Line TV shows and 16 large media conferences have been held separately.
For the first time, the Kremlin had to combine the two events as a forced measure due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, the Kremlin administration returned to the format of the two separate events. But starting from 2023, the combined variant has been used.
For many years, Thursday was traditionally chosen as a standard day of the week for such events. They were held on Thursdays for 28 times, according to TASS calculations. This year, however, the event will take place on Friday.
The presidential press secretary explained the decision by media sphere trends. In his words, Thursday was initially chosen with an eye on weekend editions of TV programs and newspapers. In this regard, "the beginning of the second half of the week" was the optimal time for a question-and-answer session or a press conference. However, the very structure of information flows has changed over the past few years, according to Peskov.
"Right now, it is absolutely irrelevant when to hold the show - on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. The information is spreading at the speed of light, all over the world, round the clock," Peskov said. "Therefore, the day of the week does not play any role whatsoever."
There are no limits on the event’s duration as well, and it will continue for as long as necessary, the press secretary said. "This is not the right place and the right time to set records," Peskov said.
Over the past few years, presidential question-and-answer sessions and large press conferences lasted approximately four hours or more.