Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is going East, with or without his dog called Beast.
The Russian version of Forbes reports that the social network mogul is heading to Moscow to meet with Prime Minister and former President of Russia, social media-savvy Dmitry Medvedev.
You may remember that, in 2010, then-President Medvedev traveled to Silicon Valley to hang out at Twitter, Cisco and Google, and to receive a yet-to-be-released iPhone 4 straight from Steve Jobs.
Deputy PMs Vladislav Surkov and Arkady Dvorkovich will also reportedly attend the meeting with Zuckerberg, which Forbes’ sources say might take place in the Digital October building. It is located in the heart of Moscow and would indeed provide an ideal setting for this type of pow-wow.
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Zuckerberg will coincidentally visit Russia in early October, still according to Forbes, and is also planning a visit to Skolkovo.
If you’ve missed our earlier coverage, Skolkovo is basically a massive ‘technological innovation center / smart city-laboratory’ project, an initiative that was undertaken by the Russian government in partnership with tons of – mostly giant – private companies.
If you insist: some people refer to it as the ‘Silicon Valley of Russia’ as well as ‘Medvedev’s pet project’. Skolkovo was announced in November 2009 by Medvedev, when he was still President of Russia, and is headed by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett.
Forbes wasn’t able to figure out whether Facebook currently has any plans to open an office in Skolkovo.
Zuckerberg has some ties with Russia, of courses, thanks to billionaire businessman Yuri Milner and his investment firm DST, which invested in Facebook.
It will be interesting to see if Zuckerberg will also reserve some of his time to meet with executives from Russian technology leaders like Yandex, Mail.Ru and Vkontakte during his visit to Moscow.
More when we learn more.
Image credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
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