Russian has more than 700,000 troops deployed in the war zone in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin said on Friday while conversing with soldiers at the Kremlin on the June 12 national holiday.
Flanked by Defence Minister Andrei Belousov, Putin spoke confidently of victory in the "special military operation" he ordered against the neighbouring country in February 2022, which quickly escalated into Europe's worst conflict since World War II.
"Step by step, not as quickly as we would like, but we are moving forward nonetheless; We are moving forward every day," Putin said.
As early as December, during his annual press conference and public Q&A session, he had spoken of some 700,000 soldiers in Ukraine. At the time, he said they were mainly young people, including those born in the 1990s.
Complaints about Ukrainian drones
The soldiers spoke at length about problems caused by drones deployed by the Ukrainian military, which also uses the Starlink satellite communications network for this purpose. Russia lost access to this network earlier this year.
Putin acknowledged that Ukraine had stepped up its use of drones to divide Russian society and inflict economic damage but insisted that this has not worked.
Russia is now developing drones equipped with artificial intelligence and building its own network of low-Earth orbit satellites, he added. Technically, the problem had been solved, and it was just a matter of scaling up, according to the president.
For months, the Ukrainian military has been intensifying its drone strikes on Russia's oil industry to deprive the war effort of fuel, decrease earnings from exports and erode public support for the war.
Russian occupation authorities in Crimea recently restricted petrol distribution, and the export of kerosene from Russia was initially banned until the end of November.
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