The Russian Foreign Ministry will have its own state information system

According to the document, the system will consist of 12 subsystems, including those for automatically collecting information, analyzing and forecasting the international situation, monitoring the information field and preparing materials “to promote Russia’s interests abroad.”

In addition, it will provide support to Russian citizens abroad, ensure communications within the Ministry’s central office, consular and diplomatic missions, and unite all communication channels of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs into a single system.

The system operator will be the Research Centre for Informatization of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the project will be funded from the budget of the new national project “Data Economy”, but the specific amounts are not specified in the draft resolution.

The technical director of the Sfera platform (part of the T1 holding), Yuri Druchinin, told Kommersant that the costs of this project depend on the ready-made solutions of the contractor with whom the department will work. The cost of the platform may amount to several billion rubles, and a significant part of it will be spent on developing it from scratch.