President Vladimir Putin's suggestion in July to rebuild two monasteries within the Moscow Kremlin has been left unfulfilled as researchers struggle with a lack of information on how to properly conduct the project, state news agency Vesti reported Thursday.
"At the current stage, we have no more than 20 percent of the information needed for reliable reconstruction" of the Chudov and Voznesensky monasteries, historian Vladimir Kiprin, an adviser on the project, was quoted as saying.
During a meeting with Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and the curator of the Kremlin Museums last summer, Putin said that reconstruction of the monasteries and an accompanying church could take place if the project receives enough public support as well as approval by the United Nations' cultural branch UNESCO due to the Kremlin being an internationally designated world-heritage site.
That approval, however, has yet to be given, and demolition of an administrative building, Corpus 14, to make room for the monasteries, "might cause a number of rather negative consequences," Kremlin Museums associate director Andrei Batalov said in comments carried by Vesti.