The Russian women risking their reputations to campaign for the return of their conscripted husbands
By Diana Magnay, Moscow correspondent
In a rented apartment in a Moscow suburb, Paulina is playing with her baby daughter, Aurora. Just twenty years old, motherhood suits her and Aurora is a happy, giggling child.
But like so many in Russia and in Ukraine, her father is on the frontlines – and Paulina wants him home.
“I talked to my husband, and he said don’t ask for benefits or money – ask for us to come home,” she says. “If my husband told me to ask, then I will. I don’t think I’m violating any laws.”
Her husband was mobilised in October last year, one of 300,000 in a partial mobilisation which sent shockwaves through Russian society.
Putin’s approval ratings dipped, hundreds of thousands fled the country, people took to the streets, though those protests were quickly suppressed.
But more than a year on, small groups of women like Paulina are campaigning to try and get their husbands home, with video appeals on social media and a few attempts at public protest, quickly broken up by the authorities.
“We are against legal slavery. Both mobilised and contract soldiers must have the right to be released from military service upon expiration of the contract or from one year after the end of conscription.
“We are against the country’s leadership ignoring our problem and remaining silent.”
That’s the message in a video on one Telegram channel called “Way Home”. A group of women stand in the snow holding up sheets of paper calling for demobilisation.
The channel has been labelled “fake news” by Telegram. State propagandists claim it is run by Alexey Navalny’s team from abroad on behalf of Ukrainian and Western interests.
A well polished rival video has found its way onto social media. A series of women filmed in picturesque locations all across the country speak in succession, explaining to their fellow compatriots that those wives who complain are being “weaponised” by NATO and the West.
“The horrible stories that allegedly come from the front are written by people sitting in offices far away from the frontlines and getting money for it,” they say.
“They are the runaway criminals from Alexey Navalny’s friends, who are already proficient at destroying our country. They are creating another structure from the wives of the mobilised.”
It is a kind of info-war between the mothers and wives.
This time last year, similar groups of women were speaking out on social media.
Their messages were mainly directed at getting adequate kit and sustenance to the freshly mobilised. They attracted significant media interest.
The most active among them, Olga Tsukanova, was promptly labelled a foreign agent. Their voices were quickly suppressed.
The ability of these latest groups to continue to speak out will almost certainly be curtailed.
Most of them were never engaged in politics before. It is their first encounter with a system which has methodically eradicated anti-war sentiment or dissent of any kind, though that may come as news to them.
But now they are asking themselves the same questions about human rights, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly as political activists used to.
And they are not opposition but simply women who have given their menfolk to the war for a year now and feel they have done their bit.
“They feel they have a right to influence this system,” says political activist Yulia Galyamina, who has also been labelled a foreign agent by the state.
“The fact that they internally feel this right is very important. But of course, they may be crushed in the same way as everyone else because the very serious repressive machine in Russia is monstrous.”
