DThe medical soldier's wife is talking herself into a rage. “Will our men be considered to have fulfilled their military duty if they are brought home after being seriously wounded and released when they are nothing more than a heap, without arms or legs?”
What if men had turned into “vegetables” and could no longer do anything, let alone support their families? Do we even have to wait for their return in the zinc coffin in which the bodies of fallen soldiers come home in Russia? “When will our men’s duty be considered fulfilled?” asks Marija Andreyeva.
On Thursday evening, the petite woman in her mid-thirties sits on a leather sofa in an event room called “Agnostic” in the east of Moscow, brick walls, loft look. To questions like these, Andreyeva and her fellow campaigners, some of whom also came, receive no answers from Russia's powerful. At least not one that would satisfy her. The Russians have been fighting for weeks to bring their men back from the front in the Ukrainian war – men who were drafted in the “partial mobilization” ordered by President Vladimir Putin in September 2022 and have been deployed in the war to this day for a year and a quarter.
Putin doesn't meet with critics
There will be no “second wave” of mobilization, Putin assured in his four-hour question-and-answer show on state television around mid-December. But there is no prospect of return for the survivors of the “first wave”. Obviously, because the army would find it difficult to replace the so-called mobilized, despite reports of success with a large number of enlisted soldiers.
Putin himself has sent clear signals about where his priorities lie. In November 2022, when women and mothers of soldiers wanted to make their voices heard after the mobilization, the president did not meet any of the critics, but invited other women to his Novo-Ogaryovo residence west of Moscow and spoke to them about death for the The fatherland, which was to be expanded to include Ukrainian territories, was presented as a desirable goal in life.
Even now, in the new wave of discontent, Putin has not yet met any of the women who are campaigning for their husbands' return. Instead, at the beginning of December, he symbolically announced his renewed candidacy in the presidential elections in mid-March in the Kremlin at the request of parents who lost sons in the war. On New Year's Day, Putin visited injured soldiers in a Moscow hospital and later received combatants from various units in Novo-Ogaryovo.
The women fight for the return of their husbands
A few days later, at the Russian Orthodox Church's Christmas celebrations, there was a reception for families of fallen soldiers and children. The message is clear: the soldiers must stand to the last if necessary, the war continues as a “strategic choice for which every Russian will pay,” as political scientist Tatjana Stanovaya writes for the Carnegie think tank. It's about “sacrificial patriotism” with the willingness to “give up even the most expensive thing for victory: the children.”
Marija Andrejewa and her colleagues do not want to accept this perspective. Since the fall, several channels have been created on Telegram by women who are concerned about the return of their husbands, sons and brothers. “We’re getting the boys back” is the name of one of them and has almost 28,000 subscribers.
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