Putin orchestrates meet with soldiers’ moms
At a highly choreographed event days ahead of Russia’s Mother’s Day, President Vladimir Putin met Friday with mothers of servicemen fighting in Ukraine and said that he shares their pain in an apparent attempt to contain a growing outcry over the Kremlin’s handling of the war.
The televised event at Putin’s residence outside Moscow came amid intensifying public criticism over the conditions recent Russian conscripts have been forced to bear, including being thrown into combat ill-equipped and illprepared. Some of the 17 women who attended said they had lost their sons on the battlefield.
Activists said that the meeting’s participants were likely preselected by the Kremlin and had their questions screened beforehand. Some appeared to be government officials and pro-government activists, according to a list published by the Kremlin.
Olga Tsukanova, leader of the Council of Mothers and Wives, a prominent grassroots organization of relatives of Russian servicemen, said no representatives of the group were invited to meet Putin, despite having requested an audience.
“Who is our president? Is he a man or something else, who is running away from women behind the backs of special services,” Tsukanova said in a statement Friday, adding that she and some members of the group have been under surveillance.
Putin urged the women at the meeting not to trust the media and the internet, which he said were full of “fakes, deception and lies.”
The mothers of Russian troops have traditionally played a powerful role in society. In the 1980s, the first real signs of opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan came from soldiers’ mothers. And during the 1994-96 war in Chechnya, they became a powerful symbols of public dissent against the conflict.
But protests over the war in Ukraine have been more muted, likely because of a harsher climate for dissent.