Could Russian mothers hold the key to ending the war?
Fury that their sons may be ‘cannon fodder’ in Ukraine, and their deep-rooted moral authority, could help bring peace, says Judith Woods
The first inkling, here in the West, that something unexpected was happening on the home front came with an astonishing phone conversation captured by cameras on day eight of the Ukrainian conflict.
“Don’t worry, Natasha, he’s alive and well. You will get a call later.” The Ukrainian woman nodded as she reassured a Russian woman that her tearful boy in mud-smeared fatigues was in safe hands.
He did not appear to have been subject to torture and seemed to be speaking of his own volition, but officially he was a prisoner of war. In reality, the young soldier was some mother’s frightened son.
And as one woman empathetically reached across the proverbial barricades to another in solidarity, it afforded the rest of the world a glimpse of what Mother Russia perhaps fears most: the mothers of Russia.
In the Second World War, the famous Russian propaganda poster, with its slogan “The Motherland calls!”, was designed to galvanise families into supporting the war effort. In this terrible war, hopes are growing that the mobilisation of Russian mothers unwilling to watch their sons cynically dispatched to their deaths could just alter the course of it.
For in this nightmarish conflict, it is the mothers’ voices raised in horror and anger within his own borders that is giving Vladimir Putin pause. Why? Because under his rule, they alone have the moral authority to publicly call him to account.
It is no coincidence that yesterday, on International Women’s Day, a ponderously bombastic occasion marked by bouquets and blandishments, Putin directly addressed the mothers of soldiers.
On Monday, angry Russian mothers accused him of deploying their sons as “cannon fodder” in his invasion of Ukraine. “We were all deceived, all deceived. They were sent there as cannon fodder,” one woman shouted at a meeting in the Kuzbass region in Siberia. “They are young. They were unprepared.”
In previous years, the president’s crass annual speech variously hailed the women of Russia for “staying beautiful”, for “always being on time” and for possessing “a mysterious power”. That power is becoming ever more apparent as the soil of Ukraine is soaked by the blood of bewildered servicemen, told they would be “greeted with flowers” by a grateful population, then mowed down as invaders.
“I would like to address the mothers, wives, sisters, brides and girlfriends of our soldiers and officers who are now [...] defending Russia during the special military operation. I understand how you worry about your loved and close ones,” said Putin. “You can be proud of them, just as the whole country is proud of them and worries about them together with you…”
Russia will not use any conscript soldiers in Ukraine, Putin then went on to claim. “I emphasise that conscript soldiers are not participating in hostilities and will not participate in them. And there will be no additional call-up of reservists,” he said. But the mothers of Russia are not content to stay at home in a state of anxiety; they have form in uncovering inconvenient truths. The Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, Russia’s best-known advocacy group for servicemen’s rights, was first set up in 1989 as the Soviet Union ushered in an era of perestroika, with a free press and respect for human rights.
The group was a powerful player throughout the 1990s, when Moscow waged a disastrous war against separatist militants in Chechnya. In maintaining pressure at a local level, they are a force to be reckoned with.
In the past week, the committee spoke openly of the “sea of tears” which has resulted from the invasion of Ukraine. It will not have gone unnoticed in the highest echelons of Putin’s ranks.
“The soldiers’ mothers are one of the few bastions of civil society in Russia, and they tend to atrophy and then regalvanise every time there’s a war, making them a very effective pain in the Kremlin’s collective backside,” says Prof Mark Galeotti, an expert in Russian security affairs at University College London.
“They don’t have political power, but they have a lot of moral authority and, as we have seen in Ukraine, mothers and grandmothers carry a lot of influence and are afforded respect.
“In and of themselves, soldiers’ mothers won’t bring an end to war, but they do help shape opinion. They are also a bona fide grassroots movement that serves as a reminder that this is Putin’s war, not Russia’s war.”
One grassroots movement has given rise to another. When several thousand women recently protested outside the Russian embassy in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, they explicitly called on Russian women to rise up and stop the war in Ukraine.
“You can stop this war, if only you will go to the streets and say, ‘We don’t want this war when we don’t want our children to die’,” march organiser Daiva Zeimyte told the crowd.
There are precedents for women making a visible stand. In Northern Ireland, the women’s peace movement harnessed the will in both communities for an end to hostilities and the need for diplomacy eventually giving rise to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
In Argentina, the military dictatorship of the late 1970s prompted major protests by mothers and grandmothers known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, over their adult children being “disappeared” by the regime.
After that poignant moment when the Ukrainian woman spoke to her Russian counterpart, a rallying cry went up on social media that all mothers should come and fetch home their sons. Next, the defence ministry confirmed this extraordinary suggestion was now government policy: “A decision has been made to hand over captured Russian troops to their mothers if they come to collect them in Ukraine, in Kyiv,” said Olena Zelenska, wife of the Ukraininan president.
The official Russian death toll, just under 500, has not been updated for more than a week now, and state media do not cover Russian casualties at all.
Mothers of the soldiers who had been apparently sent into Ukraine took to social media on the first days of the war to post frantic messages, looking for their husbands and sons. The page of the Soldiers’ Mothers on the VK social media website was flooded with comments including personal details about their men, asking others if they had heard about the whereabouts of their military units.
A mobile phone film also emerged this week of Sergey Tsivilev, governor of the Kuzbass region, accidentally revealing to a crowd of women that their sons had been sent to the front lines to die.
Standing awkwardly at the front of a half-empty sports hall, Tsivilev was explaining to the crowd that their young sons were fighting in Ukraine when he uttered the phrase: “They were used...”
After a moment of stunned silence, the women began to cry out: “Used?! They used our children?” A stuttering Tsivilev attempted to explain himself, as the mothers shouted him down.
Heartbreaking. Harrowing. When even a writer for Pravda confesses “I cannot differentiate between the tears of a Russian mother and a Ukrainian mother – sorry”, it should be blindingly obvious to all that human loss trumps all imperialist fantasies.
But in order for it to make a palpable difference, maternal dissent must reach a tipping point, according to Emily Ferris, research fellow at the think tank RUSI (Russia Eurasia).
“There has been a huge clampdown on the Russian military using their phones in order to prevent news about how the war is going leaking out to the population back home,” says Ferris. “That affects the morale of the soldiers and their families. Mothers panic if they can’t contact their sons, sons feel cut off and demoralised, especially when they live in poor conditions.”
We have already seen footage of Russian soldiers crying, begging to come home and denouncing a war they had no idea they were entering. New film has also just emerged of a captured officer in which he apologises directly to the Ukrainian people.
“I cannot find the words to say sorry to the Ukrainian people,” said Lt Col Astakhov Dmitry Mikhailovich.
The question remains: as the awful truth of shelled hospitals, kindergartens and defenceless civilians trickles back home, could Russian mothers take to the streets?
“It’s very hard to imagine mass demonstrations, as Putin has placed tight restrictions on the freedom of assembly,” says Ferris. “The riot police have been noticeably violent towards people just standing around. But the government would be aware that seizing mothers of soldiers would not make for good optics.
“Large-scale peace protests are conceivable as long as they don’t attack Putin directly, but the situation is changing hour by hour. Nobody knows how the situation will develop.”
There’s an old Russian proverb that springs to mind: “If a child doesn’t cry, the mother won’t know what it wants.” Ukraine, along with the rest of Europe, is begging the mothers of Russia to make themselves heard in their Motherland.