No public events. No speeches, memorial church services for fallen soldiers or mentions on state television.
Three years after sending troops across the border into Ukraine, Russian officials are marking the anniversary on Monday with a resounding silence.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is not scheduled to attend any events on Monday for the anniversary of the full-scale invasion that he ordered, which has metastasized into Europe’s biggest military conflict since World War II.
Russian state TV opened Monday morning news bulletins with routine reports from the front lines in Ukraine, making no reference to the symbolism of the date.
And local officials who typically toe the Kremlin’s line on glorifying the invasion — casting Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine as heroes and the war as a moral imperative — were uncharacteristically quiet on Monday.
Nor is Russia mourning its casualties — which U.S. intelligence estimates to be in the hundreds of thousands including the wounded — in any public way on Monday.
However, independent Russian journalists in exile published a joint report saying that Russia had lost over 165,000 soldiers in three years of fighting, based on publicly available data from court records. Those figures could not be independently confirmed, and Russia’s defense ministry refuses to disclose casualty figures.
A top Russian diplomat made no mention of the anniversary on Monday but praised the Trump administration’s efforts to draw closer to Mr. Putin and bring an end to the war.
“A cease-fire without a long-term settlement is a path to renewed fighting and conflict at a later date with even graver consequences including for Russian-American ties,” Sergei A. Ryabkov, a deputy foreign minister, told the RIA Novosti news agency, a week after Russian and U.S. officials sat down for talks for the first time in three years.
“We don’t want that,” Mr. Ryabkov went on. “We need to look for a long-term settlement that should include a way to deal with the underlying reasons for what has been happening in Ukraine and around it.”
Article by:Source:
