Putin stops in Tyva to answer questions from high schoolers en route to Mongolia

Vladimir Putin addressed a class of high school students in Kyzyl, the capital of the southern Siberian republic of Tyva, on Monday as part of the mandatory Important Conversations propaganda initiative introduced by the Russian government in September 2022 to “boost patriotism” among Russian pupils.

The topics discussed by Putin included the Russian offensive in the Donbas, challenges faced by schools in Russia’s border regions, peace talks with Kyiv, hostile countries, trans women in sport and how he sleeps at night.

Discussing the war in Ukraine, Putin admitted that people in Russia’s Kursk region were experiencing “challenging circumstances” amid Ukraine’s ongoing offensive there, before adding that Ukraine had failed to achieve its principal objective, namely to stop the Russian offensive in Donbas.

Noting Russian advances in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Putin said that he was “sure that this provocation will also fail and after that there will be a desire to really […] move ahead with peace talks.”

Putin also promised to “return life to normal” for children going to school in Russia’s Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod regions, all of which border Ukraine.

Putin stressed that Russia did “not have enemy languages, or even have enemy countries” but rather “hostile elites in some countries that have been fighting Russia for centuries with the goal of weakening the country.”

Wading into the heated debate around trans women in sport, Putin accused trans women of “killing women’s sports”, labelling their participation in women’s sporting competitions “completely unfair”.

The de facto Russian leader was also asked how he slept at night, to which he responded: “It would be awkward to lie, so I will tell it like it is, though it’s not a good example — today I slept four hours, this is not enough and usually I sleep about six hours.”