'Leave our men alone' The women speaking out against Putin

On the  backdrop of snow-capped birch trees, a group of women wearing white headscarves blend into the Russian winter landscape.

- Pjotr Sauer

In a country where public dissent is rare, their blunt message to Vladimir Putin stands out: bring our men back from Ukraine.

“We want a total demobilisation. Civilians should not be engaged in the fighting,” says one of the women at the start of the nine-minute address this month. “There are many of us, and our numbers will only grow.”

The woman is Maria Andreeva, 34, and she is one of the unofficial leaders of a newly emerging grassroots movement that has been gaining momentum in Russia in the past few weeks.

They are the wives and mothers of some of the 300,000 Russian men who were conscripted in September 2022, at a critical period for the Kremlin when it needed to shore up its troop numbers after Ukraine recaptured swathes of territory in the south and north of the country.

More than a year later, with their loved ones still on the battlefield, many women are staging public protests and writing open letters taking to task the official narrative that mobilised troops are required in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“Why should our men who led a peaceful life have to go to Ukraine?” Andreeva, who lives in Moscow, says. “If our government decided to attack a smaller country, let the army fight but leave our men alone.”

Andreeva says the movement emerged in September after Andrei Kartapolov, the chair of parliament’s defence committee, told the press there would be no rotation for troops in Ukraine and they would return home after the special military operation was completed.

Russia has a history of female-led protests during wartime. Wives and mothers led an anti-war movement during the first Chechen war in 1994 that helped turn public opinion against the conflict and played a role in the Kremlin’s decision to stop the fighting.