Putin meets grieving mothers and says: We share your pain

President Putin met the mothers of Russian soldiers who had been fighting in Ukraine yesterday, and told them: “We share your pain.”

In a clip broadcast on state media, the Russian leader sat with the group of mothers around a table with tea, cakes and bowls of fresh berries and said he empathised with those who had lost their sons.

“I would like you to know that, that I personally, and the whole leadership of the country — we share your pain,” he said.

“We understand that nothing can replace the loss of a son — especially for a mother,” Putin said, breathing heavily, and frequently clearing his throat. “We share this pain.”

The mothers listened to Putin’s remarks but their own comments to the president were not immediately shown in the recorded television clip.

The meeting came as Putin faces growing opposition from the mothers of serving soldiers, who say he has turned their sons into “cannon fodder” for the war in Ukraine.

The activists previously accused Putin of snubbing a request to meet them and discuss the poor treatment of conscripts at the front and at training bases in Russia.

“You are the commander-in-chief and you are completely responsible for the destructive reforms in the army and for what is happening in military units,” the Council of Mothers and Wives said in a statement on Thursday.

The Kremlin caved in to pressure this week and promised Putin would hold a meeting with soldiers’ mothers in the coming days to coincide with Mother’s Day in Russia, celebrated this Sunday.

But the council, a prominent women’s group that sprang up this year, says it has received no invitation and fears that Putin will meet hand-picked, pliant soldiers’ mothers in order to cover up real concerns.

Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers have been sent to fight in Ukraine — including some of the more than 300,000 reservists who were called up as part of a mobilisation announced by Putin in September.

The war, which began in February, has killed or wounded 100,000 soldiers on both sides according to the United States, although Russia has only admitted to 5,937 of its soldiers being killed by September.

Putin has previously said he has no regrets about launching what he calls Russia’s “special military operation” against Ukraine.

The Council of Mothers do not criticise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but complain that sons and husbands have been dispatched to the war with little training, denied essential equipment or conscripted despite having valid exemptions.

Olga Tsukanova, a co-head of the council, said in an address to Putin and “all men in power” that she and other mothers had travelled to Moscow to be ready to meet the president, and they wanted real dialogue with the authorities rather than the fake event with “pocket mothers” that she suspected was being arranged.

“Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin], are you a man or what?” she asked in the video, posted on social media this week. “Do you have the courage to meet and look us in the eye, not with your hand-picked women and mothers, but with real [women], who have travelled from various cities at their own expense, here, to meet you? We are here; we are ready to meet you. We are waiting for your answer! Or will you hide again?”

On Tuesday Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, confirmed a newspaper report that the president would hold a meeting with mothers of soldiers. It appeared that could include relatives of those conscripted as part of the president’s mobilisation of 300,000 reservists to fight in Ukraine in September.

The meeting was “in preparation”, Peskov said, and would not necessarily be public.

Tsukanova, 46, the mother of a 20-year-old conscript from the city of Samara, told the Dozhd independent television channel that her group had members all across Russia, about 500 of whom were actively involved in campaigning.

Rather than addressing serious complaints about soldiers’ treatment, the authorities were prosecuting the people who raised them and sending secret policemen to trail the activist mothers around Moscow as a means of intimidating them, she alleged.

Tsukanova said she and other mothers had met MPs and other officials in the capital but received no invitation from the Kremlin. She doubted Putin would meet her but if he did it would demonstrate that the president was “ready for at least some kind of dialogue and we can voice our questions to the whole country”.

The Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia, a group that has acted to protect soldiers from rights abuses and violent bullying since the 1980s, said it had not been invited to take part in Putin’s meeting either.

Since the beginning of last month relatives of conscripts in at least 15 Russian regions have made official complaints to the authorities asking for the soldiers to be sent home from the front in Ukraine or training bases in Russia because of poor conditions and weaponry.

Putin reinstated the Soviet-era “Mother Heroine” award in August and the Kremlin is keen to be seen as caring for soldiers’ families.

The designation is given to mothers who raise ten or more children, including any offspring lost at war. The mothers are awarded a one-time payment of one million rubles (£13,700) as soon as their tenth child is a year old.