At a meeting with mothers of servicemen participating in the special military operation in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin answered a question about the continuation of mobilisation measures in the country.
One of the women at the meeting told the president that her other son was 17 years old.
"I am horrified to think that when he turns 18, he will go [to fight], too,” she told Putin.
The President assessed the need to continue the mobilisation with one phrase:
"No need to, no need to, that's enough for us."
Putin also noted that it was time for the woman's second son, who was serving in the zone of the special operation, to return home and have a vacation, since he and his colleagues "have already fought enough."
During the meeting, Putin also recalled Russia's position on the republics of Donbass in 2014. According to the president, the Russian administration then hoped that Donbass would be reunited with the rest of Ukraine.
"We were hoping that, perhaps, it would be possible to reach an agreement, that Luhansk, Donetsk, within the framework of the agreements, the Minsk agreements, which you probably know about, would still be able to somehow reunite with Ukraine. We sincerely went for it. We did not fully feel the mood of the people, though. It was impossible to have a clear understand of what was happening there,” the president recalled.
At the same time, Putin stressed that Russia should have made those republics part of the Russian Federation earlier. It would have then be possible to avoid such losses among the civilian population, he added.
Putin held the meeting with mothers of Russian servicemen on the eve of Mother's Day (November 27). Press Secretary of the President Dmitry Peskov earlier said that the president would discuss topics that servicemen's mothers wanted to raise.