Russian President Vladimir Putin, during a meeting with students on the occasion of the start of the new school year, defended that Russia is as invincible today as it was during World War II.
“I understood why we won the Great Patriotic War: it is impossible to defeat a people with such a mentality,” said Putin, who regularly draws parallels between the war against Nazi Germany and the war he unleashed in Ukraine.
“We were absolutely invincible and we still are today,” he said, quoted by the French agency AFP.
Putin’s meeting with the teenagers coincided with the start of the new school year and the beginning of the “Important Talks”, patriotic education courses introduced shortly after the offensive against Ukraine began.
The Russian president told the students about the contents of the letters exchanged between his father, who fought at the front, and his grandfather.
Putin said he was impressed by his grandfather’s determination, who after losing his wife, who died in the war, ordered his son to: “Beat these motherfuckers!”
“These are our values. Why shouldn’t we take care of them? They are the basis of our existence, of our life”said Putin.
“And today such families constitute the overwhelming majority” of the population of the Russian Federation, he added.
Moscow describes the war against its neighbor as an existential struggle, accusing Ukraine’s power of being in the hands of anti-Russian neo-Nazis in the service of a West bent on destroying Russia.
The school year was also marked by the introduction of a new History textbook in secondary schools featuring Putin’s version of the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces on February 24, 2022.
The manual includes a map of Russia with the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporijia, which were annexed a year ago, although the Russian military does not fully control them.
Putin describes the four regions and Crimea, which was annexed in 2014, as historically Russian territories that should never have been part of Ukraine.
The Russian leader described teenagers from the annexed “new regions” as “very talented, hardworking, energetic.”
“No one has an outstretched hand, everyone is ready to work, it is only necessary to create conditions,” he said.
He said that “people in the new regions” see Russia’s commitment to providing them with “basic things that were forgotten by the previous authorities,” in a reference to Ukraine.
“We just have to catch up and reach the Russian average level. It is not the fault of the people living in these areas,” he added, quoted by the Russian agency TASS.
Source: DN
