Protests Mark Latest Instance of Russian Women’s Growing Resistance to Mobilization
Women protest outside the defense ministry in Moscow, June 2024. Photo: Radio Free Europe
On Sept 21, 2024, around 20 Russian women gathered outside the capital holding up banners that demanded a meeting with Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and the return of their mobilized loved ones. The demonstration took place on the second anniversary of the decree signed by President Vladimir Putin ordering the mobilization of reserve citizens to the war in Ukraine.
Police forcibly dispersed the demonstration after the women said they would camp out overnight. At least two women, Anna Bogatchenko and Anastasia Slavik, were charged with holding an unsanctioned public event which is punishable by a 10,000- 20,000 rubles fine or up to 40 hours of forced labor.
The women who attended the protest expressed their mounting frustrations with the indefinite absence of their loved ones. Although President Putin declared the end of partial mobilization in October 2022, he never officially terminated the operation. Later he announced that the bolstering of Russian troops would remain in effect until the end of the conflict.
A week after the start of the full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia introduced war censorship laws that made criticizing the war punishable by up to 15 years in prison. In past years, women have served as one of the few demographics in Russia openly voicing criticism of the Kremlin — despite Putin increasingly curtailing and criminalizing free speech and political dissent.
Police escort Sasha Skochilenko, 33, to her hearing on Oct. 19, 2023 after she was charged with spreading misinformation. Photo: Dmitri Lovetsky, AP News
Women’s resistance movements have taken many forms. In 2022, Sasha Skochilenko made international headlines when she was sentenced to seven years in prison for replacing supermarket price tags with antiwar information. Other major demonstrations have included laying flowers at a monument to a Ukrainian literary figure in Moscow, wearing white headscarves as a signifier of their dissent, and the organized clanging of pots and pans out of windows.
Large-scale women’s organization efforts take place mostly within chatrooms. One such movement is Soft Power, which focuses on subtle, safe resistance. Soft Power has encouraged women to take more sick days, slow down bureaucratic processes, write petitions, organize webinars, and send support to political prisoners.
Russian recruits board a bus to a military recruitment center on Sept. 28, 2022, after President Putin ordered partial mobilization. Photo: AP News
Another group, a channel on the messaging app Telegram called “The Way Home” with over 40,000 members has organized protests and published a manifesto calling for a one-year limit on mobilization. When founded, The Way Home maintained its patriotism, but its messaging has grown increasingly critical of the war and Putin’s leadership. So far, there are no reports of members of the group being detained. Maria Andreeva, the most outspoken activist of The Way Home, was held up by police during a solo protest near the Kremlin in January but was quickly released.
With some exceptions, the Russian Government has stepped lightly in their repression of women’s dissent, mostly using denial of permits as well as gentle persuasion and intimidation to dissuade protest.
Abbas Gallyamov, a Russian Political analyst and former Putin speechwriter turned critic told NBC News, “The Kremlin’s repression machine is fine-tuned against ‘damn’ western-learning liberals and the nation’s ‘traitors,’ but these women are not it, they are the people that the Kremlin is leaning on and tries to represent, so mass repressions against them is a completely different story.”
While authorities may want to avoid the optics of imprisoning the female relatives of active-duty military members, resistance has thus far operated on a subtle scale that does not blatantly trigger legal retribution. It is unclear whether women will be able to maintain this level of immunity if the scale of their resistance continues to escalate.
Regardless, growing dismay at indefinite mobilization has brought together large groups of Russian women. As calls for demobilization go unanswered, their criticism is evolving to outwardly questioning the legitimacy of the war in Ukraine, which has caused the estimated death of 70,000 Russian soldiers and economic hardships.