President Putin to Meet Mother of Reserve Soldiers Sent to Ukraine War

Blessings of Russian reserve troops before being sent to the Ukrainian battlefield. (Wikimedia Commons/Yellow

JAKARTA - Russian President Vladimir Putin will in the coming days meet with mothers of reservists sent to the Ukraine war, the Kremlin said.

In September, President Putin announced a 'partial mobilization' effort to summon hundreds of thousands of new fighters to the battlefield, after Ukraine retook large swathes of territory in a retaliatory offensive. This is the first since World War II.

The war in Ukraine resulting from the Russian invasion also sparked the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Hundreds of thousands of Russian troops have been sent to fight in Ukraine, including more than 300,000 reservists, as part of a mobilization announced by President Putin.

The meeting with the soldier's mother, which was first reported by the Vedomosti newspaper, was confirmed by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. Russia is known to celebrate Mother's Day on November 27.

"Indeed, such a meeting is planned, we can confirm", Peskov told reporters when asked if President Putin would hold a meeting with the mobilized families, reported by Reuters on 23 November.

"Such meetings are in preparation. The president often holds such meetings, but not all of them are open to the public. After all, the president receives first-hand information about the actual situation", he continued.

Previously, the United States military estimated that on November 9, Russia and Ukraine each saw more than 100,000 of their soldiers killed or injured in the ongoing war.

President Putin said he had no regrets about launching what he called Russia's "special military operation" against Ukraine, viewing the war as the defining moment when Russia finally confronted the arrogant Western hegemony after decades of humiliation in the years since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

Two weeks ago, President Putin said the 50,000 Russian troops who were called in as part of the partial mobilization were now at war with combat units in Ukraine, the Interfax news agency reported.

He explained that 80,000 troops are 'in special military operations zones', the term Russia uses for the war in Ukraine, the rest of the nearly 320,000 conscripts remain in training camps in Russia.

"We now have 50,000 troops mobilized in combat units. The rest have not yet taken part in the fighting", President Putin said during a visit to the Tver region, outside Moscow, TASS reported.

Russia ended its partial mobilization efforts in late October, with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu saying as of October 28, about 41,000 Russian fighters had joined their combat units to fight in Ukraine.