Russian Women Protest Long Deployments for Soldiers in Ukraine

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

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

The speaker was part of a new, grass-roots movement that has been gathering steam in Russia over the past several weeks. Women in various cities are seeking to stage public protests, challenging the official argument that mobilized troops are needed in combat indefinitely to secure their Russian homeland.

Hand-lettered posters behind the speaker in the video echoed that sentiment with slogans like “Do only the mobilized have a homeland?” A video of the speech, delivered at a rally in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on Nov. 19, was released online.

The nascent movement is a rare example of public displeasure with the war, the kind that the Kremlin has sought to suppress through draconian laws. The women and the government officials have been involved in a delicate dance, with the protesters trying not to trigger those laws while the authorities seek to avoid hauling the relatives of active duty soldiers off to jail.