On the one hand, you’ve got Vladimir Putin telling the working women of Russia that they need to start sacrificing their free time — their lunch breaks at work — in order to sneak off to a specially-designated area with their husbands to, as he puts it, procreate . . . make more babies . . . lots and lots of babies . . . for the benefit of Mother Russia, whose birth rate has dropped precipitously in recent years.

While on the other hand, you have 70,000-plus Russians — mostly young men — who have been killed since February 24, 2022, fighting Putin’s war of attrition in Ukraine. Young men who would likely have been responsible for bringing quite a few new lives into the world had they been at home with their wives and sweethearts where they belonged, instead of being killed on a foreign battlefield.

You do the math.

And it turns out that now, for the first time, volunteer enlistees — not professional soldiers — constitute the majority of those killed in that war since its inception: volunteers who were enticed by higher pay and signing bonuses to do a job for which they were not qualified or properly trained. [Olga Ivshina, BBC, September 19, 2024.]

The BBC has gone to great lengths to verify the numbers and identities of the casualties, which thus far total some 70,112 . . . though the actual count is believed to be considerably higher, as some families do not share details publicly, and some information was not available to the BBC investigators. [Id.]

And now — aside from the absolute horror of the loss of those tens of thousands of young lives in Ukraine — young couples back home in Russia are being told that they must make up the losses by cranking out babies they may not want or be able to afford. And the women, of course, will be expected to do double duty as working mothers of multiple children . . . all for the sake of Putin’s “special military operation.”

For once, I have no words . . .

Brendochka
9/22/24