The woman was standing alone near the Kremlin with a protest sign in her hands when she was suddenly detained by the police. Arresting demonstrators is not unusual in Moscow, but this was different because Maria Andreeva is the wife of a Russian soldier fighting in Ukraine.
“Our boys are dying on the front for the authorities, and they are detaining the wife of a conscripted soldier – can you believe it?” she cried as she was led away. Her caption read: “Freedom for the mobilized! Bring back our husbands, fathers and sons!”
She was later released without charge, possibly because the Kremlin wants to avoid drawing attention to such protests.
In recent weeks, Andreeva, 34, has become the most public face of a growing movement of wives and mothers trying to pressure President Putin to bring their husbands and sons home from the war. Russia has called up about 300,000 men into the army in September 2022. Those who are not killed or wounded remain at the front and it is unclear when they will be allowed to return.
“The war in Ukraine is a mistake and we will have to pay dearly for the short-sightedness of our government,” Andreeva told The Times after her arrest in Moscow. “This war is only needed by the authorities. It has brought nothing but misery to the people.”
Her husband, whose name she declined to give, was a masseur before the war and the couple have a two-year-old daughter. He could have avoided the draft, she said, but enlisted out of a sense of duty. Her cousin is also at the front.
She accused the authorities of lying to the mobilized soldiers, telling them they would be in Ukraine between six months and a year and that they would not be sent to frontline positions. “They tricked us,” she says. “Actually, I’d say we got screwed.”
Scattered women’s protests, petitions and direct appeals to Putin have become increasingly visible, exposing cracks in Russian society nearly two years after the invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin is believed to have told officials to stop the demonstrations from escalating at all costs. “Convince, promise, pay. Anything, as long as it doesn’t go out on the street,” employees were told, according to Insider, an opposition website.
“The wives of the mobilized soldiers have become a real pain in the rear of the Russian authorities,” Michael Nacke, an exiled Russian journalist who opposes the war, said in a recent online video. “They are slowly turning into a real movement. The authorities do not understand what to do with them, because on the one hand these are enemies who show that not everything is as rosy as Putin claims. But on the other hand, these are women who they say they are generally in favor of the war and victory over Ukraine.”
Andreeva said in November that the Kremlin’s “special military operation” was necessary because after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine had been left “to roam free, like a difficult teenager, and that shouldn’t have happened.”
She insisted that she had not changed her views, but admitted that she was now “not sure that our authorities have done enough not to go to war”.
She said she felt sorry for the people of Ukraine, whose homeland has been ravaged by Putin’s invasion, but also echoed Kremlin propaganda that the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Bucha in 2022 was staged by Kiev to discredit the Russian military. She declined to comment on the bombing of Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city, or Putin’s false accusations that President Zelensky is a Nazi.
Paradoxically, however, Andreeva also warned that Russia faces a bleak future if Putin remains in power. “His current term has been full of laws and actions that are against the people,” she said.
She was apolitical before the war and never voted for Putin. When asked who her husband voted for in the presidential election, she said she never discussed it with him. “I realize now that this is a strange situation,” she said.
Another protester, Maria Ishkova, said she had traveled from St Petersburg to Russian-occupied Ukraine to spend New Year’s with her husband, also a conscript, only to be told he had been killed. “Our men are dying for nothing,” she said in a video posted by The Way Home, a Telegram channel created by the wives and mothers of mobilized soldiers.
The channel, which has about 40,000 subscribers, added its own message to Putin and other senior Russian officials: “Burn in hell.”
The worst-case scenario for Putin would see wives and mothers take to the streets in large numbers ahead of the presidential election, which is expected to be as tightly controlled as ever, in March.
On Saturday, Andreeva and a number of other wives expressed their displeasure at one of Putin’s campaign offices in Moscow. Amid angry scenes, Andreeva told the Russian leader’s campaign headquarters that “no one attacked us” and that she did not understand what her husband was doing in Ukraine. “What is he protecting us from?” she asked.
An officer tried to reassure her by suggesting that it would be a mistake to demobilize men like her husband because it would be a blow to their masculine pride. “If they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t go there. They would leave the country,” she said.
Recently, Andreeva also met with Boris Nadezhdin, a potential presidential candidate who has declared himself against the war. She opposed the Kremlin’s policy of granting presidential pardons to prisoners, including those convicted of gruesome murders, in exchange for six months in Ukraine. “My husband has been in the trenches since February. Why doesn’t our society care that the inhuman prisoners – cannibals, serial killers and so on – have been released?” she asked.
Tatyana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst, said the meeting with Nadezhdin “annoyed” the Kremlin because it risked highlighting the women’s grievances. “At the moment, the Kremlin does not consider this movement dangerous. The main tactic is to try to downplay it. But over time, this problem will become more acute,” she said.
Some of the women say they were warned by police that they would be charged with extremism if they continued to speak out. The Way Home Telegram channel said last month that some soldiers had been ordered by the FSB state security service to make their wives “shut up”.
Andreeva said she fully understood that she and the other wives could be arrested. “It is very easy to be charged with a crime for criticizing the authorities in Russia,” she said. “But I am acting in the interest of my family.”
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2024-01-24 20:30:00
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