Thousands of people writing directly to Vladimir Putin

ProjectPutin.com is a project for people who are discontent with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, disapprove the Russian military interventions, and want to express their feelings directly to the man responsible for the situation – Russia President Vladimir Putin.

It’s hard for common people to reach their politicians or to openly express their opinions about the current political events. In the case of the Russian president, it´s even harder. According to Ben Judah’s latest book, Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin, Putin is unreachable by any modern means of communication. He loathes the internet, publicly condemning it as a spy project developed by the Pentagon.

As a former KGB agent, Vladimir Putin likes to keep to his daily routine. As a part of it, every morning, he reads all the top international press, including the German newspaper Die Zeit. With the help of our supporters we will buy a full page in Die Zeit, letter by letter. Through our project – miles away from Russia’s censorship – people from tens of countries will make their voices be heard by one of today’s most feared and powerful leaders.

In order to participate in our project, you can go to our website, www.ProjectPutin.com, type your message and pay for it via PayPal at a cost of 0.5 Euros per letter. The amount of money raised will be used to buy a full page in Die Zeit for the publication of all the messages registered on our site. The text messages have to be written in English and are moderated by the project coordinators.

The developers of the project were inspired by an interesting discovery made by 14 year-old Suvir Mirchandani from Pittsburgh. The teenager concluded that if the federal government used exclusively Garamond typeface, it could save nearly 30% on the annual ink costs - around $136 million per year*. As we have been searching for the best space saving typeface – in order to place the largest number of letters on the page in Die Zeit at the lowest fares – we decided to use Garamond printing font as well.

Until the date of this text release, more than 1 000 letters have been sold already.

According to our terms and conditions, we won’t share any information about our supporters. Project Putin is a non-profit organization, and every Euro will be used exclusively in the project’s purposes. Upon successful completion, snapshots with all the messages printed in Die Zeit, along with all the invoices issued, will be published on the project website. In case we won’t be able to bring the project to a successful conclusion, all money will be refunded.

* http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/27/living/student-money-saving-typeface-garamond-schools/