Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted some 18 mothers of Russian military personnel serving in Russia’s special military operation, including some who had lost their sons, ahead of Mother’s Day in Russia, which is Nov. 27. He told the mothers that the entire Russian leadership, “and I personally,” shares their pain. “We understand that nothing can replace the loss of a son, a child. Especially for mothers, to whom we all owe our lives, who bore and fed us.” The discussion that followed, judging from the Kremlin transcript that has so far been published, was respectful but also forthright in terms of the problems that the mothers face on behalf of their sons. Putin was welcoming of the mothers, who were from widely scattered parts of Russia, and he encouraged them to be honest, and the mothers were both supportive of Russia, while also engaging Putin on the bureaucratic problems they have encountered, such as in the provision of necessary social services, and that their sons have reported to them.
Strategic matters were addressed, also. Putin mooted that Russia’s efforts, through the Minsk agreements, to reunite Donetsk and Lugansk republics to Ukraine were, in hindsight and knowing what Russia knows now, were a mistake. “Today it has become obvious that this reunification [of Donbass and Russia] would have taken place earlier. Probably, there would not have been so many losses among civilians and so many children would not have been killed by shelling, and so on.”
Putin stressed that Russia is not fighting Ukrainians as such, those who are but the regime’s backers. “Unlike those who we have to deal with, and in that sense, we have to fight not them, but those who supply everything to them and pay for it, using them as cannon fodder, as a matter of fact. That’s not an exaggeration: They don’t have any regard for the cost to human life, no regard at all,” he said.
Putin spoke of the change brought about in Russia by this fight. Russia used to live by someone else’s rules, but that is no longer true, “The events of today are a path to some internal purging and reinvention.”
In the 1990s and the 2000s “it seemed to us everything would be okay, but it wasn’t so…. Moreover, we started to live and play by someone else’s rules and we took delight in the fact that someone was trying to control us. Ultimately those who tried to control us—it’s thanks to their efforts, by and large, that we ended up in that situation, including in the zone of the special military operation. They pushed us to do this. Nothing would have happened” if it hadn’t been for the coup in Ukraine in 2014 that toppled the government in that country.
