Russian Spokesman Peskov recalls unexpected path to learning Turkish

Russian Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov has shared how he first began learning the Turkish language during his university studies, describing it as an unexpected academic assignment that later proved valuable, AzerNEWS reports.

Speaking in an interview with Channel One Russia, Peskov explained that language selection at the institute was determined through academic placement exams, which allowed students to choose the languages they wished to study based on their results.

According to him, he initially aimed to study Arabic but did not achieve the required score to secure his preferred choice.

“I wanted to study Arabic. Because of lower results, I was assigned Turkish as a form of placement,” Peskov said. He added that although the assignment was not voluntary at first, his experience studying Turkish and broader Turkology eventually changed his perspective.

“After a few years of studying the Turkish language and Turkology in general, I realized it was actually a very good outcome,” he noted.

Peskov graduated in 1989 from the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Moscow State University. He immediately joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the former Soviet Union after completing his studies.