War Against Ukraine: The Wives of Russian Soldiers

Injured, inexperienced, left alone: ​​dozens of appeals by angry soldiers’ wives are circulating online. A “Council of Mothers and Women” is now putting pressure on the government across the country. Vladimir Putin tries to appease.

The video only lasts three minutes and yet shows a lot of what Russia doesn’t want to see publicly about its war in Ukraine: It’s a chaotic scene, dark and shaky. You can see men in uniform and hear women’s voices. According to Russian media reports, around 20 women who traveled near the Ukrainian border in early November to look for their husbands and get them out of the occupied territories.

A military official warns the women that they are unnecessarily fomenting panic. “But how can I not panic,” replies the woman from the off, “when they set off and weren’t even given a car?” Presumably it is about the relatives of the women who are said to have already made their way out of the combat zone. One of the military men tries to appease: the wanted men would not serve in his division. The women angrily reply: “Don’t talk nonsense!” That’s what they’ve been hearing all along.

No general criticism of the war

Videos like this one have been circulating on the Russian Internet for weeks: of angry or desperate women. Mostly it is criticism of regional administrations, sometimes also of the leadership in Moscow – but rarely general criticism of the war.

Elena Kuznetsova is the wife of a mobilized soldier from Vologda. In a video, surrounded by other women, she says that her husbands only went to the shooting range four times before they had to go to Ukraine. After that, she lists a lot of questions: “Why was there no real military training? Why no commanders and clear tasks? Why no technical equipment?” In the end, she calls for “the return of our husbands and sons from hell.”

Another soldier’s wife, Irina Vitalinka, started a petition on the social network “VKontakte”. She demands that mobilized should only fight in the second or third row. But in the text of her petition, she also writes that Russia needs a “reliable line of defense.” That her boys “stand up for their homeland and their families.” The mobilized soldiers should not be seen as deserters or anything like that. War yes, but please not like that. Not with the mobilized who, despite the lack of training, have to fight on the front lines.

Almost 50,000 people have signed Vatilinka’s petition so far. An interview request from ARD Studios Moscow However, she refused: she feared, she wrote, that her statements about “Ukrainian war crimes and the involvement of European states” would be cut out and instead only “her dissatisfaction with Russia” would remain.

“Council of Women and Mothers” is sharply critical

The “Council of Women and Mothers” met for a round table in Moscow on Wednesday. It is now a nationwide movement that is said to include military wives from nearly 90 Russian cities, Olga Tsukanova, a council representative, told online media Doszhd. There was discussion and live streaming for almost three hours.

The result was a sharply worded joint declaration: “We, the citizens of Russia,” it begins, “express our distrust of the power system.” The country’s leadership is corrupt, it says. So corrupt that it is the people themselves who have to provide the soldiers with shoes and clothing. There is a “catastrophic shortage of commanders”. The Russian army has been run down for years.

But instead of “investigating corruption and lawlessness in the army and on the line of contact,” the statement said, freedom of speech and expression are being restricted. Council representative Olga Tsukanova reported how hooded men would follow her home. As cars lead behind her. And the journalist Ilya Baltabayev, who supports the council in its work, is said to have been attacked.

Putin personally meets with women

Just one day after the round table in Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced that Vladimir Putin wanted to meet soldiers’ mothers in person. The Council of Women and Mothers, however, was not invited. They traveled to Moscow especially, explained Tsukanova, and were ready to conduct a dialogue. “But for some reason they don’t invite real people,” criticized the council member in advance. Instead, they are “mothers close to the authorities,” if they are mothers at all, Tsukanova suspected in advance. The meeting a kind of backstage meeting – “that’s it.”

Whether Tsukanova was right is hard to say. For today’s meeting, only Putin’s own introduction was broadcast publicly. In it, on the occasion of the upcoming Mother’s Day, he promised in an almost cracked voice that he personally shared the pain of those present. The country’s leadership would “do their best,” he explained, so that the soldiers’ mothers would not feel forgotten, so that they “feel a shoulder beside them.”

But with all the apparently warm words, Putin also warned at length about fakes and lies in the media. Because that too is a weapon, according to the Russian President. However, it is clear to everyone here that life is more complex and varied than what can be seen on the Internet. One would have liked to hear what the soldiers’ mothers who were present answered – but the transmission was already over by then.