The woman in the video, her face blurred, gave a blunt assessment of Russian military policy: Soldiers mobilized more than a year ago to fight in Ukraine deserved to return home. Why weren’t they?
“Our mobilized army has become the best army in the world, but that does not mean that this army must remain there until the last man,” she said. “If he did something heroic, sincerely shed blood for his country, then maybe it was time to return to his family, to make way for someone else, but that’s not the case. is not the case.”
The speaker was part of a new grassroots movement that has gained momentum in Russia in recent weeks. In various cities, women are seeking to stage public protests, challenging the official argument that mobilized troops are needed indefinitely to secure their Russian homeland.
Handwritten posters behind the speaker in the video echoed this sentiment with slogans such as “Do only the mobilized have a homeland?” HAS video Part of the speech, delivered at a rally in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on November 19, was published online.
The nascent movement is a rare example of public discontent with the war, the type of discontent that the Kremlin has sought to suppress with draconian laws. Women and government officials engaged in a delicate dance, with protesters trying not to trigger these laws while authorities sought to avoid sending relatives of active-duty soldiers to prison.
So far, authorities have acted lightly, resorting to intimidation and cajoling rather than detention or arrests. Permits to organize gatherings in several large cities have, for example, been refused and women participating in discussion forums have complained of being harassed.
Some said law enforcement officers visited their homes to inquire about their online activities and warn them of the legal consequences of participating in unauthorized gatherings.
One of the main outlets of the protest movement was 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.
Channel organizers released a manifesto demanding that conscripted soldiers be sent home after a year in the combat zone. “Military personnel and their families, unite and fight for your rights,” the manifesto reads in part.
Authorities in Moscow and Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, recently rejected requests for permission to gather, citing as a reason a restriction on public gatherings created to fight Covid-19. In Moscow, around twenty demonstrators deployed posters with slogans like “No to Indefinite Mobilization” at a Communist Party rally on November 7. The police took them away but did not arrest 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 silent,” she said in an interview. “Many women need their husbands and sons, not money. »
Participants in protests across the country have had enough, Ms Andreeva said. While boasting that more than 410,000 men have signed contracts join army this year, the government has rejected requests from families to demobilize those enlisted in 2022.
The Novosibirsk rally, organized by another organization, was the result of a compromise between the organizers and local authorities. Instead of a protest in the streets, local civilian and military officials gathered in a government auditorium. The press was largely banned and participants had to prove they had a relative serving in Ukraine.
Chelyabinsk, a large Russian city in the center of the country, held a similar meeting at the city hall.
In Novosibirsk, organizers said countless women across Russia were “in turmoil” because all their quiet appeals and petitions had fallen on deaf ears. “The situation has pushed us and our loved ones to despair, and the people mobilized to a critical degree of fatigue, both physical and moral,” the group said in a statement.
The protest groups are careful to emphasize that they are not unpatriotic and that they strive to respect the law. They say they are simply asking the Kremlin to introduce troop rotations.
When the Russian government implemented what it called a “partial mobilization” in September 2022, mobilizing 300,000 troops, it said conscripts should remain in the army until Mr Putin decides that ‘they could be demobilized.
Having already organized one mobilization, ordering another would be politically unpopular. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Russian troops have been killed and injured, including in ongoing attacks in Ukraine, in places like Avdiivka.
The official response to the rotation request has been indirect at best. Protest organizers noted that Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made a statement last December saying that replacing mobilized troops was one of the reasons for increasing the overall number of troops.
But last September, Andrei Kartapolov, chairman of the Parliament’s defense committee, declared that there would be no rotation of troops in Ukraine, specifying that “they will return home once the special military operation finished.” A petition with tens of thousands of signatures sent to the Kremlin elicited a similar response, according to the Russian press.
“Our men are already physically and mentally tired from being here,” Ms. Andreeva said. “Enough is enough! “We must act!”
A generation ago, an anti-war movement centered around mothers opposed to the war in Chechnya was an important factor in pushing the Kremlin to end the war there. Authorities have tried to ensure that no similar national movement emerges from the current protests.
The topic of rotations is a delicate issue for the Kremlin, which seeks to ensure that any protests remain a regional issue and do not become national news that Mr. Putin would be forced to address, said Tatiana Stanovaya, who recently writes on the subject in his analytical newsletter, R.Politik.
“The Defense Ministry is cautious, preferring to increase the number of troops whenever 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 election.”
At a recent seminar on the March presidential election, held in the town of Senezh, near Moscow, regional officials were given specific instructions to prevent the women’s protest movement from metastasizing into something more vast, according to the Russian press.
Authorities said a protest could provide an opportunity for foreign powers to sow chaos, according to the Kremlin-friendly business daily Kommersant. But in a sign of protesters’ frustration, officials were told they needed to stay in touch with the women, pay attention to their problems and help them resolve them. report he said.
Another Russian publication, the independent online newspaper The Insider, quoted an unidentified regional official said the preferred strategy was to “persuade, promise, pay” to prevent any discontent from taking to the streets.
Some participants hoped the protests would spark broader questioning of the war.
One woman in the chat group described herself in text messages as a longtime participant in anti-government rallies. Although she has no relatives fighting in Ukraine, she believes that the women’s anti-mobilization movement has real potential for growth.
Communicating anonymously to avoid criminal prosecution for questioning the official narrative of the war, she said she hoped to fuel online discussions with information outlining an alternative to the official rosy picture of the war, in order to ” sow doubt on the veracity of the words of the officials and the president (well, he lies all the time).
By raising doubt, she said, she hopes “that people start to ask questions, to be interested in politics, to be interested in what is happening in the country.”
Audio produced by Adrianne Hurst.
