Wives of Russian soldiers furious as Putin sidesteps their questions on troops' return during TV appearance
Wives of mobilized Russian soldiers are furious because Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to answer their questions and did not mention when the mobilized soldiers would be able to return home during his "direct line" televised session. Women are recording videos and sharing them on the Telegram channel "Mobilization. What to do?".
What has particularly outraged the women is the fact that their questions were displayed on screen during the session, but Putin and the event organizers seemed to deliberately ignore them. "We were simply ignored. Our questions were not touched upon, and it seems like they don't want to and probably won't. These questions make them uncomfortable, apparently," speculated the wife of a soldier who has been on the front lines in a assault brigade for over a year.
"Today's 'direct line' with the President has been a blow to the hearts of wives and mothers of the mobilized soldiers. There are hundreds of us, thousands even. We all wrote, asked questions, pleaded to be heard. Everything we asked for is pain, it's a cry, it's an open wound that was simply prodded with a stick today, they laughed at us. This deafness to our pain is truly frightful," said a mother of a mobilized soldier from Novosibirsk, noting that all the questions Putin answered during his interaction with journalists and ordinary Russians were "trivial" and "nonexistent".
Activist of the "Way Home" movement, Maria Andreeva, made a promise that the "girls will cry" and start acting again.
"To be honest, I have a feeling that this is just a theater of the absurd. It's just a staged performance," noted Andreeva.
However, some women have already "cried" and started collectively writing appeals to government officials: to Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and also to the head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev. In their appeals, relatives of servicemen ask representatives of the Russian government to be accountable for their words and bring the mobilized soldiers back home.
For the first time since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Putin held a combined "direct line" and press conference.