Asked what he plans to do when he leaves the presidency, Vladimir Putin paused and smiled. “But I haven’t decided yet if I will leave the presidency,” the Russian leader replied, to laughter and applause from an audience made up almost entirely of Russians who were born after he first became president in 2000.

A month after thousands of young Russians took to the streets to protest against corruption among the Kremlin elite, Putin held a set-piece discussion event on Friday with hundreds of children, in an apparent attempt to portray himself as a youth-friendly president.

Presidential elections will take place next March and Putin is widely expected to stand and win another six-year term. An opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, who organised the recent round of protests, has said he would like to stand but his name is unlikely to be allowed on the ballot paper.

Putin spent three hours speaking with the assembled children, in a session broadcast live on Russian television. Those present appeared to have been screened to ensure there would be no hostile questions.

The discussion took place at Sirius, a school in Sochi for gifted children, which Putin opened several years ago. The tone of the discussion was set by the first question, when Putin was thanked for backing the school and for giving opportunities to so many children. “I can also tell you that I even thought up the name: Sirius,” said Putin, to prolonged applause.

Vladimir Putin visits the Sirius education centre for gifted children. Photograph: Alexei Nikolsky/Tass

Sitting in an open-necked white shirt, with hundreds of schoolchildren arranged in circles around him, Putin took questions from those present and at times picked out cards with pre-written questions on them in a game-show-style format.

Unlike Putin’s press conferences and phone-ins with the nation, which usually vary across a range of topics from foreign policy to the minutiae of regional problems, his discussion with the children was divided between talk about their own achievements in sport, music and science, and questions about Putin’s personal life and preferences.

“I like chatting with my friends, reading historical books, listening to music and doing sport,” said Putin when asked what he does in his spare time. At times, Putin was in philosophical mood, answering questions about the three values that are most important to him in life (“love, freedom and life itself”) and when asked what his childhood dream was, he declined to say but dispensed some life advice: “You know, dreams are things that change over time. You should instead be happy that you have a dream and you should make strides towards it.”



Asked whether he used the internet, Putin said almost never but said the way people use nicknames and fake identities online was quite similar to how he had adopted false identities during his work for the KGB.

There was very little discussion of politics and no mention of Navalny’s investigations into corruption among Putin’s inner circle, which were the motivation for the recent protests. The one nod to the recent events was a softball question asking what Putin thought of opposition politicians. The president, who has never uttered Navalny’s name in public, said merely that in Ukraine people had used anti-corruption slogans to get into power and now the country was even more corrupt.

The discussion quickly moved on, with a synchronised skating team telling Putin it was their dream to have a photograph with him on ice: Putin said he would be happy to oblige.

Major foreign policy questions were also absent from the discussion and there was no talk of the alleged Russian interference in the US elections or Putin’s recent meeting with Donald Trump at the G20 summit.

