Vladimir Putin is due to meet the mothers of soldiers sent to fight and die in Ukraine.

The Russian president will hold the highly sensitive meeting as the deadly war he envisioned would be over in days grinds into its 10th month.

Exact figures are hard to obtain but tens of thousands of fighters ordered to join the invasion by the Kremlin have been killed and many more injured.

Among them are some of the 300,000 reservists called up during a partial mobilisation which saw men press ganged into fighting, sometimes forcibly taken to barracks by police.

Mr Putin has imposed tight curbs on freedom of expression in a bid to control public opinion about the war but mobilisation risked shifting the mood in the country.

Russian military mothers have a long and effective history of being a thorn in the side of the government when it is carrying out overseas operations.

The Union of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia was founded as a human rights organisation in the late 1980s and became an influential voice during the first war in Chechnya.

Its founder Valentina Melnikova told the Guardian this week the audience would be cherry-picked from supportive families and said her organisation had been excluded.

She added: ‘Of course they didn’t invite us and we of course don’t want to go.’

Olga Tsukanova, the founder of another organisation representing the families of soldiers, called out the president this week, The Times reports.

The Council of Wives and Mothers head said: ‘[Putin] are you a man or what?

‘Do you have the courage to meet and look us in the eye, not with your hand-picked women and mothers, but with real [women], who have travelled from various cities at their own expense, here, to meet you?

‘We are here; we are ready to meet you. We are waiting for your answer! Or will you hide again?’

The meeting has been arranged to take place on the eve of Mother’s Day, which is celebrated in November in Russia.

There have been widespread reports of Russian soldiers being sent into battle without adequate equipment or training.

The British Ministry of Defence released a report today which said its intelligence suggests men with ‘serious’ health problems are being called up amid desperation for numbers.

It said ‘reservists are highly likely not having their medical status adequately reviewed and many are being compelled to serve with serious, chronic health conditions’.

The MOD claimed it had evidence that reservists were being sent into areas exposed to heavy shelling to dig trenches and are taking heavy losses.

It continued: ‘In Donetsk Oblast, reservists have been killed in large numbers in frontal assaults into well-established Ukrainian defensive zones around the town of Bakhmut.

‘The Kremlin will likely be concerned that an increasing number of reservists’ families are prepared to risk arrest by protesting against the conditions their relatives are serving under.’

Ukraine does not publicly disclose how many soldiers it has lost and Russia’s official figures are widely accepted to be massaged in order to hide the truth from the public.

Earlier this month, the US military estimated both armies had sustained losses and injuries of more than 100,000 personnel.

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