Family Values or Fighting Valor?
BERLIN — The Russian Army is gradually expanding the role of women as it seeks to balance President Vladimir V. Putin’s promotion of traditional family roles with the need for new recruits for the war in Ukraine.
The military’s stepped-up appeal to women includes efforts to recruit female inmates in prisons, replicating on a smaller scale a strategy that has swelled its ranks with male convicts. Recruiters have offered inmates in women’s jails a pardon and $2,000 a month — 10 times the national minimum wage — in return for serving in frontline roles for a year, according to six current and former inmates of three prisons in different regions.
Dozens of inmates have signed contracts or applied to enlist, the women said, a sampling that — along with local media reports about recruitment in other regions — suggests a broader effort to enlist female convicts.
It is not just convicts. Women now feature in Russian military recruitment advertisements.
“Combat experience and military specialties are not required,” read an advertisement aimed at women that was posted in March in Russia’s Tatarstan region. It offered training and a sign-up bonus equivalent to $4,000.
Russia’s need to replenish its ranks for a long-term war against Ukraine and its Western allies, however, has clashed with Mr. Putin’s portrayal of Russia as a bastion of social conservatism standing up to the decadent West. Mr. Putin has placed women at the core of this vision, as child-bearers, mothers and wives guarding the social harmony. This has resulted in contradictory policies.
“I am often looked at like a monkey, like, ‘Wow, she’s in fatigues!’ ” said Ksenia Shkoda, a native of central Ukraine who has fought for pro-Russian forces since 2014.
The convicts who enlisted in late 2023 have yet to be sent to fight, the six former and current inmates said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The Russian defense ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Shkoda and six other women fighting for Russia said that local recruitment offices still routinely turned away female volunteers.
Tatiana Dvornikova, a Russian sociologist, believes the Russian Army would delay sending female convicts into battle as long as it has other options.
“It would create a very unpleasant reputational risk for the Russian Army,” she said.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, women who wanted to fight for the Kremlin often found their way to the front through militias in the east of Ukraine. Others joined a Russian paramilitary unit called Española. It opened its ranks to women in September 2022, and has published videos publicizing their combat roles.
“These people take care of me, they are like a family,” said an Española fighter from Crimea who goes by the call sign Poshest, meaning “Plague.” She has fought since 2022 as a medic, sniper and airplane pilot.
All of the female soldiers said women remained rare in their units, outside medical roles. Russia’s cautious approach differs from the policy adopted by Ukraine. The number of women serving in the Ukrainian military has risen by 40 percent since the invasion, reaching 43,000 in late 2023. After the invasion, the Ukrainian military abolished gender restrictions on many combat roles. The much larger Russian military had about 40,000 servicewomen before the war. The majority, however, have served in administrative roles.
Ruslan Pukhov, who sits on the Russian defense ministry’s advisory council, said the idea of using women in combat begun to gain supporters among generals following Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, which brought them in contact with the disciplined women of the Kurd militias.
The invasion of Ukraine led Russia to consider the potential of about 40,000 women who were imprisoned. Prison officials started compiling lists of inmates with medical training.
“Everyone wanted to go, because, despite everything, it’s still freedom,” said Yulia, who said she applied to join the army while serving a sentence for murder. “Either I would die, or I would buy an apartment.”
Russia grapples with women’s wartime role.