Russian military grapples with women’s war roles
BERLIN — The Russian army is gradually expanding the role of women as it seeks to balance President Vladimir 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 much smaller scale a strategy that has swelled its ranks with male convicts.
Recruiters in military uniforms toured Russian jails for women in the fall of 2023, offering inmates a pardon and $2,000 a month — 10 times the national minimum wage — in return for serving in front-line roles for a year, according to six current and former inmates of three prisons in different regions of Russia.
Dozens of inmates from those prisons have signed military 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’s not just convicts. Women now feature in Russian military recruitment advertisements across the country. A pro-Kremlin paramilitary unit fighting in Ukraine also recruits women.
“Combat experience and military specialties are not required,” read an advertisement that was posted in March in Russia’s Tatarstan region. It offered training and a sign-up bonus equivalent to $4,000. “We have one goal — victory!”
The Russian military’s need to replenish its ranks presents as a long-term war against Ukraine and its Western allies, however, has clashed with Putin’s ideological struggle, which portrays Russia as a bastion of social conservatism standing up to the decadent West.
Putin has placed women at the core of this vision, portraying them as child-bearers, mothers and wives guarding the nation’s social harmony.
“The most important thing for every women, no matter what profession she has chosen and what heights she has reached, is the family,” Putin said in a speech March 8.
These clashing military and social priorities have resulted in contradictory policies that seek to recruit women but send conflicting signals about the roles women can assume there.
“I have gotten used to the fact that 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.
Some female volunteers do not make it to Ukraine. 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 possible retribution.
Shkoda and six other women fighting for Russia in Ukraine said local recruitment offices still routinely turned away female volunteers or sent them to reserves.
This occurs even as other officials target them with advertisements to meet broader quotas, underscoring the inherent contradiction in Russia’s recruitment policies.
The Russian army is on the attack in Ukraine. But its incremental gains have come at a high cost, requiring a constant search for recruits.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, women who wanted to fight for the Kremlin found their way to the front through militias in the east of Ukraine, rather than regular forces.
These separatist units were chronically understaffed after a decade of smaller-scale conflict against Ukraine.