Vladimir Putin has a lot on his mind these days. He’s still trying to clean up the mess from that mutiny of the Wagner Group leader, and Russia’s been sending over replacement troops with such speed that some of them are so untrained that they cannot repair their own broken-down equipment. Add this to the reported use of aged ammo that can “explode in your face,” and it’s safe to say that Putin is still losing troops at a dizzying speed. They have lost lives so rapidly, in fact, that they’ve been compared to hamburger meat.
Putin might be numb to it all by now? Or he might not be listening while fellow officials brief him on dead troops. As The Daily Beast relays, Putin offered a non-comforting response to Governor of Irkutsk Oblast Igor Kobzev, who relayed news about slaughter on the Ukraine battlefield. The Daily Beast viewed a Kremlin transcript, which described how Kobzev praised 192 troops who had recently died for Russia. And Putin, strangely, wished them “hello”:
[Kobzev] somberly shared an anecdote about a “Hero of Russia” who was killed in Mariupol early last year. “He covered a grenade with his body, thereby saving his fellow soldiers,” he said, adding that “for us they are all heroes, they are in our memory, in our hearts.” “Putin, not even bothering to look up from a photograph he was eyeing, muttered simply, “”Tell them I said hello.” Absolutely,” Kobzev said.
Not ideal! One wonders what happened here. Was Putin distracted and missed the gravity of this discussion? There’s no telling yet, but we could possibly see a Kremlin clarification/statement come out, given that this apparently sourced from their own transcript.
(Via The Daily Beast)