For weeks, their videos have flooded the Russian-speaking internet: mothers and wives of Russian soldiers mobilized to fight in Ukraine gather across Russia and demand the fulfillment of President Vladimir Putin’s promises.
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The Kremlin, after ordering a partial mobilization in September, had assured that the hundreds of thousands of conscripts would undergo solid training, receive good equipment and not be sent to the front line.
But many violations have been recorded: death at the front of mobilized; mobilization of unfit men, fathers of large families or too old; lack of adequate equipment and military training for many conscripts.
This disorderly mobilization, which pushed the authorities to admit “errors”, spread concern among the relatives of the soldiers sent to Ukraine.
This concern, which risks degenerating into discontent, puts the Kremlin in a delicate situation: if the authorities relentlessly repress any questioning of the offensive in Ukraine, the word of soldiers’ wives is sacred and imprisoning them would shock Russia. .
A sign that the government takes this seriously, Mr. Putin must for the first time meet Friday with the mothers of soldiers sent to Ukraine. But some relatives are already anticipating a carefully choreographed meeting, without discussion on the merits.
Mr. Putin will meet “mothers out of his sleeve, who will ask the appropriate questions and thank him, as always”, regrets Olga Tsoukanova, mother of a young man who is doing his military service.
“Vladimir Vladimirovich, answer our questions!” “says this woman who wants to make sure that her 20-year-old son will not be illegally sent to the front or to the border with Ukraine, where the shells are also falling.
She came specially to Moscow from the city of Samara, 900 km to the east, in the hope of being received in the Kremlin. In vain. “I imagine they’re afraid we’ll ask awkward questions. But we have to solve the problem!”
Ask for accounts
The Russian president knows how sensitive the subject of relatives of soldiers is.
In August 2000, during the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk which caused the death of its 118 crew members, he was strongly criticized, accused of having been slow to react. Then he had given a first turn of the screw to the media.
During the two wars in Chechnya, a movement of soldiers’ mothers had also embarrassed those in power and reinforced a feeling of discontent throughout Russian society.
This time, faced with a climate of heightened repression, the protests by soldiers’ wives and mothers do not directly question the offensive in Ukraine, but some denounce the conditions in which their relatives are sent there.
And their status as mothers and wives of mobilized men, gone to serve the country, gives them legitimacy and a form of protection against persecution, the power not being able to consider them as ordinary opponents.
In Russian society, “there is the unconscious feeling that women have the right” to hold power to account, notes Alexei Levinson, sociologist at the independent Levada center.
These women “demand that the State fulfill its function of” collective father “of the mobilized”, he adds. “When the state or the military commander does not fulfill their duties, women make claims.”
For now, the movement is disparate, uncoordinated. Calls from relatives in distress are broadcast on social networks, where informal collectives gather around figureheads.
This is the case of Olga Tsoukanova who also militates at the same time for a controversial opponent, Svetlana Peounova, wanted in Russia and accused of promoting conspiracy theories.
In a climate of exacerbated repression, other women still fear getting into trouble or aggravating the situation of those close to them by speaking to the press, especially foreign ones.
“We have sent official letters to the authorities,” one of them wrote to AFP, on condition of anonymity. “It’s not the journalists who are going to get our men out of the trenches and we don’t want to cause them any more problems. »
Putin claims to “share their pain”
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday, during a meeting with mothers of soldiers deployed in Ukraine, “to share the pain” of those who lost their sons, calling on them not to believe the “lies” on the military operation.
“I want you to know that I, personally, all the leaders of the country, we share this pain. We know that nothing can replace the loss of a son,” Putin said gravely.
He added that Mother’s Day, celebrated on Sunday in Russia, would be marked this year by “a feeling of anxiety and concern”, among the women concerned, whose “thoughts will be with their boys”.
He was speaking in front of women presented by the Kremlin as mothers of soldiers fighting in Ukraine, gathered around a table in Mr. Putin’s residence in Novo-Ogarevo, near Moscow. Most of them showed a closed face.
Mr. Putin and the Russian authorities only rarely refer to the losses suffered in Ukraine by Moscow.
This meeting with soldiers’ mothers, unprecedented since the start of the offensive, also comes after weeks of criticism published on social networks by relatives of men mobilized at the beginning of the fall to fight in Ukraine.
Many wives and mothers of men called up have accused the authorities of not having sufficiently trained or equipped their relatives before sending them to the front.
“Life is more complicated than what you see on TV or on the Internet, where you can’t trust anything. There is a lot of false information, deception, lies,” Putin told the soldiers’ mothers.
“It has always been the case, but taking into account modern technologies, it has become even more noticeable and effective,” he added, denouncing “informational attacks”.
This development echoes laws passed after the start of the offensive in Ukraine which punishes with heavy prison terms those accused of spreading “false information” about the army or “discrediting” it.