Kremlin Audience with Putin is whitewash, say families of conscripts

Nearly two months after mobilising tens of thousands of Russian men, the Kremlin has said that Vladimir Putin will grant some of their mothers and wives an audience to quell fears over the mass call-up.

- Andrew Roth

But advocates for soldiers' families have said they were passed over for the meeting and are expecting it to be a whitewash, covering up the Kremlin's disregard for its own soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

Valentina Melnikova, an advocate for soldiers' families going back to 1989, said she had not been approached about the meeting with Putin, which is expected to take place later this week. "Of course they didn't invite us, and we of course don't want to go," she said.

She said it would be one thing to go alone as the committee of soldiers' mothers of Russia, which she said had received thousands of complaints, more than even in the years of the Russian war in Chechnya, and meet the Russian president.

But like other rights activists who were not chosen to take part, she said she believed the Kremlin would handpick its representatives, or perhaps even fill out their ranks with planted audience members to stage Putin's meeting with the "public".

"To go together with the relatives of mobilised [soldiers] who are agreed to their husbands and sons dying on the front is not comfortable for us. We have somewhat different interests and different problems."

She declined to elaborate because of the dangers for activists discussing what Russia has called its "special military operation". There is no mainstream antiwar movement in Russia, in part because of restrictive laws that punish public dissent.