The Heads of the Circle of Kindness Foundation & Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation Meet with Putin

Head of the Circle of Kindness Foundation, Archpriest Alexander Tkachenko.

Putin keeps with the recent theme as today’s International Children's Day and meets with the heads of two organizations that were developed as a result of a Putin decree. The meeting is rather short, or I should say the transcript is as IMO much was said off camera as Putin reviewed the thick album he was presented with.

Vladimir Putin: Father Alexander, I would like to thank you for organizing the work of the Circle of Kindness Foundation. It works effectively, you have a good team of very professional people and people who are very warm to children who need special support from adults. Everything is set up properly, you reach specific families, specific children. But surely there are some issues that need to be corrected in some way, something else should be done additionally in order to support you in this work.

Alexey Tkachenko: Thank you very much for your high assessment of the activities of the Circle of Kindness Foundation and the results achieved. As you noted, the most important result is the lives of children.

We have prepared an album for you. It contains very touching stories of many children. These stories are about how life has returned to families, how these families have a tomorrow and confidence in the future.

I'll illustrate this with a few heartbreaking stories about how when you do a good deed, God helps you.

Emil was born in Primorsky Krai, and as a result of neonatal screening, which is conducted for 36 diseases in all children, a severe form of spinal muscular atrophy was detected. Doctors gave an unfavorable prognosis. There are unique medicines for such children, they are prepared individually, and we deliver them very quickly. This allows you to start treatment before the appearance of painful, irreversible symptoms.

The mother, having learned about the child's illness, refused it. The Foundation was able to deliver the medicine in the next few days after the diagnosis was confirmed, and the treatment was successful. You know, a miracle happened – a family immediately appeared in Moscow, who said: "We will take this child into our family." And thanks to the care of parents, thanks to the Circle of Kindness Foundation, the child develops in the same way as his peers.

You know, children who have experienced both illness and treatment, they are very kind, they are very deep, they have something to tell adults.

Masha recently spoke at the Public Chamber, she is 12 years old, and despite the fact that she is forced to move in a wheelchair, she has amazing energy, she listens to life, she ignites everyone around her. She wrote letters to the SVO fighters, she inspired the whole class and the whole school.

This book contains such amazing stories of children who return to school, return to sports, return to creativity, they perform at competitions. These are children who literally embrace life and teach it to adults. There are already 25,000 such children in the Circle of Kindness Foundation.

Please accept a low bow and a thank you for creating the foundation from the parents of these children.

Vladimir Putin: I wish you every success in this noble and very good work.

This fund is called "Circle of Kindness". We have created this structure and, thank God, it responds with its practical work to the achievement of the goals for which this structure was created. So I wish you every success.

Everything that needs to be done to support you, to support your work, we will try to provide.

Thank you very much. [My Emphasis]

Next Putin met with the head of the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation

Anna Tsivileva. The theme here is also children along with SMO families and the vast number of support organizations that mushroomed across Russia. The tale is told during their meeting.

Vladimir Putin: The Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation is already one year old. I want to thank you and your entire team for what you are doing.

I will not hide the fact that I am always very pleased to hear positive assessments of your work, especially from participants of the special military operation and their families.

I know that you have assembled a large team of employees, social coordinators, and 3,500 people who are interested in this work. The vast majority of them, at least, work with a heart, especially since you actively involve the guys themselves-participants of the special military operation, and their relatives in this work. And they know what our guys need, how and what needs to be done to break the bureaucracy of the decision-making system and bring to them everything that the state does to support them.

But surely there are some issues that require special attention and problems in this large-scale work. Let's talk about it.

You are welcome.

Anna Tsivileva: Mr President, today is probably a very important day for many people in Russia: for those guys who are now on the front line, for those guys who are returning home after being wounded, for their families, relatives, friends, probably for everyone who loves Russia, who cares about its fate, who have a sense of empathy, care, compassion, love, and who in turn he also believes that the state will take care of its heroes.

On June 1, exactly one year ago, on your initiative, by your Decree, the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation was established. And we simultaneously opened branches in all regions of the country.

I would like to say that the veterans themselves and their family members clearly support this initiative. They say that this is a very timely and important decision, because the foundation really helps children to return to a peaceful and creative life, to minimize the bureaucratic delays that they may encounter.

This day is also important for our employees and social coordinators. You absolutely correctly noticed that today there are more than 3,500 of them. These are people who do not work for wages, who work from the bottom of their hearts, wishing with all their hearts to help the children return to this life, to support them. To date, 200 people are veterans of the special military operation themselves, including those who have disabilities, these are 135 family members of the children, including the wives and mothers of the fallen heroes.

So for these people, perhaps, we have now united and become not just some structure, a team, but one big, friendly family, which does not have its own and others ' grief, experiences, sufferings, which does not have other people's joys and victories, we are all united. And if we are united, we are invincible.

I want to thank you, first of all, for the initiative itself, for creating the foundation. And secondly, of course, on behalf of these guys themselves and our employees for being very involved and supporting us.

Thanks to the changes in the decree that you signed, we have already started providing children with high-functioning prostheses, paying extra to the certificate that they receive in the social fund.

Just on April 2, we had a meeting with you, where we reported on our work, talked about our work and took the initiative to create such an opportunity as a technical means of rehabilitation-to provide children with hand-operated cars for specific categories – for children who can no longer be prosthetically repaired, this is with double amputation of the lower limbs, and kids in wheelchairs.

And everything is so fast: we were supported by the State Duma, already on May 6 amendments were made to the federal law, and on May 29 a decree was issued, and this law came into force. And we are already starting to issue cars to our heroes on June 1. Therefore, this work is, of course, very important.

There are also problems that we discussed earlier. I want, of course, to voice them now.

Until now, time is still being delayed with the issuance of certificates of a combat veteran. And this is a question of both justice and the fact that children with this document will be able to continue to receive all the social support measures that they are entitled to by the state.

We still do not have the status of "private military companies" and "defenders of Donbass" who are disabled in combat operations, that is, they do not pass military medical commissions. They receive disability due to a general illness, which is also a form of injustice and, consequently, insufficient payments.

These issues require interagency cooperation. For our part, as a foundation, we are ready to help the Ministry of Defense, understanding their workload, understanding now the importance of the tasks that they face, collecting documents, forming these documents, bringing them there in order to build some kind of system for issuing certificates, so that it is a systematic process. Because people sometimes wait more than a year for these documents.

Therefore, we would like these issues to be addressed more quickly. And we hope that we will be heard and will be able to help our children.

Vladimir Putin: I agree with you. The effectiveness and importance of the tasks that you have just mentioned – I mean, first of all, the implementation of tasks on the front line, on the front line – are, of course, priority things. But if people don't feel that the state is taking care of them, then these tasks are more difficult to solve. This is all in one complex, there are no issues of primary importance and second level, you need to solve everything in a complex. This also applies to solving social issues. Therefore, we will now talk about this in more detail.

The same applies to a private military company and to fighters who fought, as it turned out, with a common enemy, with neo-Nazis, even before these territories became part of the Russian Federation. Of course, this should all be regulated. We discussed it with you last time, and you raised this issue. Now let's talk in more detail about this. And, of course, we will move in this direction.

I will do my best to ensure that the Government and relevant departments speed up this work. Let's talk about the details.

Putin knows that problems within bureaucracies always occur no matter how diligently organized to prevent them. Being proactive and chatting with the heads of these and many other organizations reveal those problems that are often obscured. Putin knows the importance of solving the problems greatly outweighs trying to find out why they exist, and he’s always telling people to expect problems and to treat them as an opportunity to improve governance—conducting witch hunts to try and find the maker of the problem takes away energy needed to solve the problem. Solve the problem first then look to see what caused it. In other words, serve the people first, which may seem obvious but as we know rarely happens that way—the problem within the system is often treated as the applicant’s problem when they’re 100% innocent and just seeking what the law says is theirs.

One other thing these meetings convey is the reality of the losses being generated by the SMO. IMO, we need to understand that the losses make it very difficult to settle for less than the SMO’s initial goals and others that were generated once it began. The West clearly has no regrets over the number of losses on either side, nor the policy that has caused them. Indeed, most declare they’re in denial. Zakharova says what we now hear is “Nazi speak” from the combined West as they seek to move their mayhem to the Asia-Pacific. The next set of articles will look at how China sees that.

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