United Russia, President Vladimir Putin's party, was not short of ideas for celebrating International Women's Rights Day on March 8. Among them, the gifting of meat grinders to the mothers of servicemen who had died on the front in Ukraine during ceremonies organized in the Murmansk region, in the far north-west of the country.

The idea was to show that the mothers of heroes had not been forgotten, and that the party was taking care of them, in line with the instructions given by the head of the Kremlin, for whom veterans and their families now form the new elite. The gift was an initiative of the local branch of the presidential party, which bragged about it, publishing photos of the prizewinners with their bouquets of flowers and state-of-the-art meat grinders on the VKontakte network, the equivalent of Facebook.

In Russian, meat grinder (miasorubka) means sending successive waves of infantrymen to attack enemy lines, a tactic regularly used by the Russian army, which has little regard for casualties. The word has become part of the military vocabulary since the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and is widely used by fighters, military bloggers and commentators. In 2023, Russian mercenaries of the Wagner paramilitary group awarded their surviving veterans a medal called the Bakhmout meat grinder, named after the Ukrainian town in the Donbas that it took them over a year to conquer, at the cost of 30,000 dead and wounded.

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