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In response to
"Moscow is pouring new conscripts to the front line to try to halt Ukrainian advances."
by
crash davis
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Putin says 318,000 new soldiers have joined Russia’s forces in his mobilization push.
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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia used a National Unity Day appearance on Friday to announce that 318,000 new soldiers had joined the ranks of the country’s military under his hastily organized mass mobilization that kicked off in September. Most were still in training, but 49,000 were already in combat, he said.
Unity Day, a national holiday, commemorates the liberation of Moscow from Polish invaders in 1612. It was resurrected under Mr. Putin in 2005 to replace the celebration of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that created the Soviet Union.
Mr. Putin habitually lays flowers at a statue in Red Square that was erected to glorify the leaders of the uprising.
The symbolism melds neatly with his current justification for invading Ukraine — that Russia is fighting against the West for its very survival. But the idea of “national unity” has been tested somewhat by the mobilization of Russians for the war, with people from poorer and minority regions being sent to fight in disproportionate numbers in Ukraine.
Later on Friday, Mr. Putin is expected to visit an exhibition at the Manege, a former indoor riding academy turned exhibition space just outside the walls of the Kremlin, which stresses the theme that Ukraine is a piece of Russia.
After annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move widely condemned internationally, Mr. Putin began reworking the history of the region to establish Crimea rather than the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, as the birthplace of the Russian Orthodox faith. The Manege exhibition was created in part by “My History,” an organization that seeks to further that thesis.
Mr. Putin has returned to the theme repeatedly that Russia and Ukraine are one people, and denigrated those who claimed otherwise as trying to chip away at their natural unity. He and his supporters have dismissed the creation of Ukraine as a mistake by the Bolsheviks who founded the Soviet Union, and suggested that Ukrainian does not exist as a distinct language.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, the former Russian president who is now deputy head of the country’s Security Council and has rebranded himself as chief hawk, marked the day with a diatribe on the Telegram messaging app about how the whole world had waited for Russia to awaken to help shake off the colonial past. Ignoring that Ukrainians are fighting against the very idea of becoming a Russian colony, he claimed that Russia was seeking to reclaim its own land.
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
— Neil MacFarquhar
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