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There are three year-round education centres in Russia: the Senezh Management Lab in the Moscow Region, the Mashuk Knowledge Centre in Pyatigorsk, and the Meganom Academy in Sudak. In 2024, centres like these will open in 12 more regions, each specialising in a particular field ranging from scientific research and environmental studies to sports and rural youth issues.

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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, friends.

Today, we are holding a significant, major event. We are launching year-round youth education centres in 12 regions at once. This is a really major, visible and weighty addition.

Most importantly, the dreams of tens and hundreds of thousands of our young men and women will become a reality. Just like their peers who have implemented their projects at the Meganom Academy in Crimea, learned much at the Senezh Management Lab, Moscow Region, and discovered their mentoring talents with the help of the Mashuk Knowledge Centre in Pyatigorsk, and also got a sense of the wealth of our history and culture at Istoki Centre, which operates in the ancient land of the Pskov Region. Starting this year, Istoki will become operational in a newly built historical and archaeological park in the Hero City of Sevastopol.

To reiterate, in recent years alone, these four year-round centres helped about 150,000 young people from all regions discover new opportunities for themselves, attain new heights, and make new true friends. Now, we will have 16 such youth centres, and two more will open soon in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.

We are putting together our best practices, solutions, and initiatives. The movement and the youth centres’ infrastructure have spread across almost the entire country; they will open in all federal districts from Sakhalin to Kaliningrad, from the White Sea to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, and from Yamal to Novorossiya.

Just as we planned – and I believe this is the absolutely right thing to do – further to the results of the competitive selection, all new centres will specialise in meanings and themes, and have a flavour of their own, so that every young person can pick exactly what they find engaging and important.

For example, Kamchatka will focus on the environmental agenda, the Nizhny Novgorod Region on public and municipal governance, the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area on civil society and volunteerism, traditions of volunteering, and the Rostov Region will focus on supporting rural youth.

I would be hard pressed to give you a complete list, so I will not. When our colleagues from the regions join us live, they will update us on their centres’ specifics and advantages, as well as their prospects.

These centres have one main thing in common, though. They are meant to become points of attraction and engines of growth both in their regions and throughout Russia, and combined they will produce, I am certain of this, an across-the-board breakthrough result, allowing us to seriously increase the chances for the young people to rise to their full potential. I have said this many times before, and I will say it again that this is one of the core priorities and strategic guidelines of our state policy.

Without exaggeration, the issue is about our country’s future, the future of Russia. It is about our talented, goal-oriented and ambitious young people being able to prove themselves in various fields, so that today’s schoolchildren, university students, and young professionals, residents of small rural communities and major urban agglomerations have ample and equal opportunities to find their true calling and to establish themselves as professionals, to outline a clear trajectory of their own success here at home, and share the values of our society. They should be striving to be the first, the best in their field and at the same time to be useful for their country.

Today, we are taking an important step to expand our youth-oriented programmes in a meaningful way and to improve their accessibility. All new centres will be capable of hosting not just one-time events, such as large forums, but also function as permanent venues throughout the year and host gatherings that will bring together tens of thousands of young people, young men and women, from all over Russia, and other countries as part of international summer camp sessions and exchanges.

The Games of the Future and the World Youth Festival have clearly shown that such contacts and conversations – candid conversations among equals that are free from stereotypes and moralising – are engaging and appealing for millions of young people from different countries and for the internationally-based peers of Russia’s younger generation.

Without a doubt, the potential of the year-round centres will be fully used under our new national project, Youth and Children.

In addition, please make ample use of the infrastructure and educational capabilities of all youth centres under the Time of Heroes personnel recruitment programme, which I recently mentioned in my Address to the Federal Assembly, and which is designed to help real heroes, veterans of the special military operation, defenders and patriots of the Fatherland, take leadership positions in all spheres of life of our country.

Let us get to work. Ksenia Razuvayeva, head of Rosmolodezh (Federal Agency for Youth Affairs), is our next speaker. Ms Razuvayeva, the floor is yours.

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Vladimir Putin: I would like to thank everyone and to say something in conclusion. Colleagues from the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area, while discussing their project More Than a Trip, referred to the people working within its framework as “conduits of meanings,” a term that resonates profoundly.

I want to emphasise that each and every one of you, esteemed colleagues, who are engaged in such important and highly relevant area of working with young people are in the broadest sense conduits of meanings.

This work is of paramount importance, and it could not be more challenging. In today’s vast ocean of information, amidst a plethora of opinions, unfounded hypotheses, and information overload, compounded by the misuse of modern technologies for selfish ends by various people with agendas often hostile to our country and our people, it is crucial to convey information about our country – its history, present, objectives and development goals – clearly, effectively, competently, and with utmost objectivity to young people. The ultimate goal is to instill in the vast majority, ideally all citizens, particularly our youth, a deep love for Russia and a sincere dedication to its future. This is the essence of your work.

I want to wish you success. You are conduits of meanings. Thank you.