President Vladimir Putin visited with schoolchildren in Kaliningrad on Thursday and delivered a speech encouraging them to abandon their dreams.
The not-so-cheery message from the Russian leader was tucked in a lengthy monologue he gave at an event marking the Day of Knowledge, a holiday to kick off the school year.
Over the course of more than an hour answering seemingly scripted questions from the schoolchildren, Putin, when asked about who his mentors were, appeared to become briefly sentimental as he recalled one of the most vital lessons he said he’d ever learned.
Speaking fondly of an old KGB mentor, he told the children the man “did illegal work overseas” for decades, risking his life, and “did not expect gratitude from the motherland.”
Instead, he said, his mentor had “himself been grateful to his motherland for giving him the opportunity to work and be in demand.”
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Putin went on to say he learned the “value of being” from this mentor, thanks to the realization that such value “is not in the fulfillment of one’s ambitions, but in service.”
“I want to wish you all such mentors,” he said.
The Russian leader also repeated his distorted claims about Ukraine, telling the schoolchildren the country was created thanks to the Soviet Union and that people in the Donbas consider themselves part of the “Russian world.”
He went on to claim all of Russia was under threat due to an “anti-Russian enclave” right next door, bizarrely saying that those who “think there is some kind of aggression coming from Russia today” are wrong.
“The guys fighting there [for Russia] are risking their health and dying. They must understand what they are giving their lives for. For Russia and for the people of Donbas,” he said.
Meanwhile, children across Ukraine also celebrated the start of the school year on Thursday—except many of their schools are no longer standing and thousands of their classmates are orphaned, displaced, or dead.
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