Russian women protest against long-term deployment of soldiers in Ukraine

The woman in the video, her face blurred, gave a blunt assessment of Russian military policy: Soldiers who had been mobilized to fight in Ukraine over a year ago deserved to come home. Why weren’t they?

“Our mobilized army became the best army in the world, but that doesn’t mean this army has to stay there until the last man,” she said. “If he did something heroic, honestly shed blood for his country, then maybe it was time to return to his family and make way for someone else, but that’s not happening.”

The speaker was part of a new grassroots movement that has gained popularity in Russia in recent weeks. Women in several cities are trying to organize public protests, challenging the official argument that mobilized troops are needed indefinitely in the fight to secure their Russian homeland.

Handwritten posters behind the speaker in the video reflected that sentiment with slogans such as “Do only those mobilized have a homeland?” a video of the speech, delivered at a rally in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on November 19, was released online.

The emerging movement is a rare example of public dissatisfaction with the war, the kind the Kremlin has tried to suppress through draconian laws aimed at suppressing anti-war demonstrations. The women and government officials are engaged in a delicate dance, with protesters trying to keep these laws from going into effect while authorities try to prevent the family members of active-duty soldiers from being hauled off to prison.

The authorities have so far acted lightly, using intimidation and flattery rather than detention or arrests. For example, permits to hold gatherings in several major cities have been denied, and women on chat forums have complained of harassment.

Some said law enforcement officers visited their homes to inquire about their online activities and warn them of the legal consequences of attending unauthorized gatherings.

One important outlet for the protest movement was a channel on the Telegram messaging app called “Put Domoy” in Russian, or “The Way Home,” which has attracted more than 14,650 participants since its inception in September.

The channel’s organizers published a manifesto calling for mobilized soldiers to be sent home after a year in the combat zone. “Military personnel and their families – unite and fight for your rights,” the manifesto said in part.

Authorities in Moscow and in Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, have rejected recent requests for a rally permit, with officials citing a restriction on public meetings put in place to combat Covid-19 as the reason. About twenty demonstrators in Moscow unfolded posters with slogans such as “No to indefinite mobilization” during a Communist Party meeting on November 7. Police led them away but did not detain them.

Maria Andreeva, who helped organize the protest in Moscow, said the government had largely responded by offering more money and benefits to soldiers’ families. “They agree to pay us even more, but only if we keep quiet,” she said in an interview. “Many women need their husbands and sons, not payments.”

Participants in protests across the country are fed up, Ms. Andreeva said. While people are crowing that more than 410,000 men have signed contracts participate the military this year, the government has brushed aside the families’ demands to demobilize those drafted in 2022.

The meeting in Novosibirsk, held by a different organization, was the result of a compromise between the organizers and local authorities. Instead of a street demonstration, local civilian and military officials gathered in a government auditorium. The press was largely banned and participants had to prove they had a relative in Ukraine.

Chelyabinsk, a major Russian city in the center of the country, held a similar meeting at City Hall.

In Novosibirsk, organizers said scores of women across Russia were “seething” as all their silent appeals and petitions fell on deaf ears. “The situation drove us, our family members, to despair and those mobilized to a critical level of fatigue, both physically and morally,” the group said in a statement.

The protesting groups are going to great lengths to emphasize that they are not unpatriotic and that they strive to respect the law. They say they are simply asking that the Kremlin implement troop rotations.

When the Russian government implemented a so-called “partial mobilization” in September 2022, calling up 300,000 troops, it said the conscripts should remain in the army until Putin decided they could be dismissed.

Because a mobilization has already taken place, ordering a new mobilization would be politically unpopular. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been killed and injured, including many in ongoing attacks in Ukraine in places such as Avdiivka.

The official answer to the rotation question was indirect at best. Protest organizers noted that Sergei Shoigu, the defense minister, issued a statement last December saying that replacing mobilized forces was a reason to increase the total number of soldiers.

But last September, Andrei Kartapolov, the chairman of Parliament’s defense committee, said there would be no rotation for troops in Ukraine, noting that “they will return home after the special military operation is completed.” A petition with tens of thousands of signatures sent to the Kremlin provoked a similar response, according to Russian press reports.

“Our men are already physically and mentally tired of being there,” Ms. Andreeva said. “That’s enough! We must act!”

A generation ago, an anti-war movement united around mothers opposed to the war in Chechnya was a major factor pushing the Kremlin to end the war there. Authorities have tried to ensure that the current protests do not spawn a similar national movement.

The topic of rotations is a delicate issue for the Kremlin, which wants to ensure that any protests remain a regional issue and do not become national news that Putin should speak out about, said Tatiana Stanovaya, who recently wrote about the topic in her analytical newsletter, R.Politik.

“The Ministry of Defense is cautious and prefers to increase the number of soldiers where possible and keep them at the front,” Ms. Stanovaya wrote. She said any decision on a new wave of mobilization would be “particularly undesirable in the run-up to next year’s presidential elections.”

At a recent seminar focused on March’s presidential elections, held in the city of Senezh, near Moscow, regional officials were given specific instructions to prevent the women’s protest movement from spreading into something bigger, according to Russian press reports.

According to the Kremlin-sympathetic business newspaper Kommersant, authorities say a demonstration would give foreign powers the opportunity to sow chaos. But in a nod to the protesters’ frustration, officials were told to keep in touch with the women, pay attention to their problems and help resolve them. report said.

Another Russian publication, the independent online newspaper The Insider, quoted an unidentified regional official said the preferred strategy was “persuade, promise and pay” to avoid any expression of discontent on the streets.

Some participants hoped that the protests would lead to a broader questioning of the war.

A woman in the chat group described herself in text messages as a longtime participant in anti-government rallies. Although she has no family members fighting in Ukraine, she believes the women’s anti-mobilization movement has real potential to grow.

Communicating anonymously to avoid criminal charges for questioning the official narrative of the war, she said she hoped to fuel online discussions with information that painted an alternative to the rosy official picture of the war, to “assuage doubts sowing about the veracity of the words of officials and the president (well, he lies all the time).”

By voicing doubts, she said, she hoped “people will start asking questions, become interested in politics, become interested in what’s happening in the country.”