Russian President Vladimir Putin said that 99.9 percent of Russians would be willing to sacrifice their lives for the good of the country amid Moscow's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
Putin spoke on the matter during an interview with journalist Pavel Zarubin during a Christmas Day Rossiya-1 broadcast from Moscow. The Russian leader said that he has been reassured of his people's commitment over the last several months and "throughout the entire history of Russia's existence," according to a report from the state-run TASS News agency on Sunday.
"As for the most—99.9%—of our citizens, our people that are ready to sacrifice everything for the Motherland, it doesn't strike me as unusual," Putin said. "But it just reassures me yet again that Russia is a special country and it has special people."
When pressed about those who act counter to his goals, the Russian leader was dismissive of them, saying that they were not "true patriots," but affirmed their right to have the "freedom of choice."
"There's nothing surprising about the fact that some people didn't act like true patriots," Putin said. "Because in any society there are always people who think about their own interests, meaning their own plans. To be honest, I don't judge them. Every person has freedom of choice."
While the Russian leader did not specify which behaviors he viewed as counter to his plans, Russia has been dealing with a notable wave of desertions amid its efforts to mobilize troops for its invasion of Ukraine. In late September, in the face of significant military setbacks, Putin announced Russia's first partial mobilization since World War II in an effort to bolster his military's ranks.
In response, over 370,000 Russian men fled their homes by October 4 to neighboring countries in order to avoid enlistment. Kazakhstan alone claimed at the time to have seen around 200,000 people enter its borders for that reason, with others also heading for Finland, Georgia, and Mongolia. A search by Newsweek also found 6 mile build-ups of traffic heading into Georgia the day after Putin made the mobilization announcement.
"What we're currently seeing is a deeply chaotic and unpopular mobilization effort that is pretty much guaranteed to fail," Joel Hickman, the deputy director of the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), said in a prior statement to Newsweek. "Whilst hundreds of thousands of young healthy Russian men are fleeing across Russia's borders, there are reports of thousands of elderly men with numerous health problems being marched to the nearest recruiting centers."
Despite this pushback, the Kremlin said by the end of October that its effort to mobilize 300,000 new soldiers had been accomplished. The effort, however, continued to be wracked by chaos, with reports emerging of men being sent to the front lines with little or no training or equipment.
Newsweek reached out to foreign policy experts for comment.
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