The Moscow Times published material with this document. It claims that employees of Russian budget-funded organizations and activists from pro-government movements were ordered to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his birthday and report on meeting planned targets for such posts.
The table lists the Volgograd Region Committee for Youth Policy, the youth center “Constellation”, participants in the “Volunteer Medics” movement, and university students among the recipients. The formats mentioned included video greetings, flash mobs, and social media posts, and the documents required the number of participants, links to the posts, and details of the responsible person.
According to the published document, organizations and activists across Russia, as well as in the self-proclaimed “DPR”, were supposed to submit reports. The greetings were for Putin’s 74th birthday.
A separate technical brief was prepared for the authors of the video greetings: they were supposed to talk about themselves, explain how Putin’s example affected their work, then thank the president and congratulate him on his birthday. The document emphasized that the message should look like a personal, sincere first-person account, not an official speech.
The channel “Chelyabinsk of the Future” reported that on October 7, the phrase “good health and inexhaustible energy” addressed to the president was mentioned more than 1,600 times on Telegram, and that state bodies and pro-Kremlin organizations, according to it, received guidelines with the hashtag “CongratulationsToThePresident”. “Careful, News”, citing workers, wrote that in Bashkortostan budget workers were instructed to publish such posts on VKontakte from 8:00 to 14:00, one post from each state institution, while “Agency” drew attention to instructions for officials from the Vladimir Region, where greetings had to be posted on personal pages and supplemented with themed photos, videos, and a hashtag.
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