‘The authorities don’t hear us’ The rise and fall of Russia’s women-led demobilization movement
When Vladimir Putin ordered a military mobilization in late September 2022, the backlash was immediate. Hundreds of thousands of draft-age men fled the country, and mass protests broke out in dozens of Russian cities for the first time since the war’s early days. Since then, Russian women whose loved ones were drafted to fight in Ukraine have been calling on the authorities to send their men home. In fact, the women-led opposition to mobilization evolved into a diverse movement, comprising disparate groups that often found themselves at odds over the war itself. Pressure from the authorities only amplified these divisions — so much so that the demobilization activists began to suspect each other of cooperating with the security services or the anti-Kremlin opposition. In the end, infighting and intimidation led to the movement’s collapse, leaving the partners and relatives of draftees angry and disappointed that their voices were never heard. OVD-Info journalist Marina-Maya Govzman traces the rise and fall of Russia’s demobilization movement.
The following story appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Click here to subscribe! The original reporting was first published by OVD-Info, an independent media and human rights group that focuses on monitoring and combating repressions in Russia.
Last September, on the second anniversary of Russia’s military mobilization, Maria Semyonova joined a group of women for a protest outside the Defense Ministry building in Moscow. It had been two years since her boyfriend left for the front, and like the other girlfriends, wives, and relatives at the rally, she had come to demand that mobilized soldiers be sent home.
“Before, I paid no attention to politics, much less the Ukraine issue. I voted against the constitutional amendments [in 2020], but I wasn’t completely opposed to Putin. When the war began, I was shocked, but my boyfriend supported it,” Maria recalls. “At first, I told him it was wrong, but he made a strong argument and I believed him. It was only in the summer [of 2022] that I began to think it was bullshit.”
The dozen or so women gathered outside the Defense Ministry came from various regions of Russia. Some carried hand-painted posters calling for demobilization, while others wore custom T-shirts. When members of a pro-Kremlin youth organization arrived and tried to disrupt the rally, the protesters stood firm.
But this protest would be their last. As evening fell, law enforcement officers arrested all of the participants, whisking them off to different police stations where they were charged with the misdemeanor of violating regulations on public assemblies. Maria was fined 10,000 rubles (about $110 at the time).
“No one would have written about us if we hadn’t protested,” she says. “I consider the entire situation a crime of the state against its citizens, and I don’t want it to be forgotten.”
Bring Back the Boys
Maria, a 27-year-old law school graduate from Moscow, had been with her boyfriend Artyom for about a year when he was called up to fight in Ukraine. It was her first serious relationship, and the young couple had rarely discussed politics. “We argued, but not to the point where we were foaming at the mouth,” she says.
Maria remembers having a brief argument with Artyom after he voted for the ruling United Russia party in a municipal election. But she ended up shrugging it off, and they never spoke about it again.
Artyom received a draft notice just a few days after Putin announced the mobilization in late September 2022. He was given three days to get ready to leave. Maria recalls that when Artyom told his father the news, he replied: “Attaboy, have you packed your things?”
Looking back, Maria says that if she’d known then what she knows now, she would have “broken things off and left.”
In the year that followed, Maria would wait for rare phone calls from Artyom whenever he returned from the front. In the meantime, she tried to find some legal loophole that could bring him home. “As time went by, I became more and more radicalized,” Maria says. “And now I have no doubt that everything that’s going on is clearly wrong.”
Maria joined every online group for women whose relatives had been mobilized that she could find, including ones sharing petitions calling for the return of men from the front. And it was in one such group on VKontakte that she met Olga Katz, one of the first leaders to emerge from the demobilization movement.
Katz’s group was called “Bring Back the Boys” (Vernyom Rebyat in Russian). She herself was trying to bring home her younger brother. According to Maria, Katz wasn’t opposed to cooperating with the authorities — a notion Maria dismissed as “nonsense.”
Before long, their paths — and the demobilization movement itself — would diverge over such disagreements.
‘A terrible betrayal of our great president’
At first, the women advocating for demobilization limited their efforts to submitting formal appeals to every possible government department and seeking one-on-one meetings with officials. For example, another group called “Women’s Home Front” (Zhensky Tyl) even proposed setting up a joint working group with the authorities, which would be tasked with “bolstering the army’s ranks” by replacing draftees with “retired servicemen, migrants, and law enforcement officers.”
In the words of Maria Semyonova, Women’s Home Front was effectively advocating for a new wave of mobilization. “In their view, a full demobilization would be an unpatriotic and pro-Ukrainian act against our Motherland,” she explains. “For them, rallies are out of the question — this would be ‘a terrible betrayal of our great president.’”
Women’s Home Front describes itself as an “association of mothers, wives, sisters, fiancées, and girlfriends of soldiers conscripted into the Russian Armed Forces as part of the partial mobilization.” The group supports the military, organizes events jointly with the United Russia party, and claims to follow “the guidance of our president, V. V. Putin.”
But supporting the authorities and delivering humanitarian aid and military kit to the front wasn’t enough to protect them from harassment. In one Telegram post, the group complained about battling “hordes of bots and jerks who deliberately badmouthed and devalued us, made us feel ashamed and demotivated, and equated us with [Ukrainian psyops].”
“They’ve tried to make us — [women] whose men have been defending Russia’s borders since the fall of 2022 — outcasts in Russian society,” the group lamented.
Other pro-Kremlin demobilization groups include Soldiers’ Widows of Russia (Soldatskie Vdovy Rossii), which claims Moscow is “building a new just world,” and Katyusha, a self-described “movement of officers’ daughters” that has urged the mobilized soldiers’ relatives “not to give in to provocation” and refrain from protesting.
Olga Katz opposed protest rallies, as well. In one interview, she dismissed public protests and the urge to “stomp one’s feet angrily in Red Square” as “illegal methods” that undermine “lawful opportunities” for advocacy. (Katz blocked the OVD-Info correspondent who tried to contact her for this story.)
According to Paulina Safronova, who joined Katz’s VKontakte group in the spring of 2023, Bring Back the Boys forbade all political discussions and conversations with journalists, and immediately censored messages that hinted at organizing protests or pickets.
Paulina wasn’t especially interested in politics before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But the same can’t be said about her husband, who was mobilized that fall. After he lost the paper with his draft notice, he went to the military enlistment office himself. Paulina was 18 years old at the time, and their daughter, Aurora, was just three months old. “It was a major trauma,” she says.
Paulina was removed from the Bring Back the Boys group chat in December 2023, shortly after she gave her first interview. “They didn’t want any publicity,” she says. “Especially not from ‘foreign agents.’”
‘They just nodded like trained seals’
A few months earlier, in September 2023, a demobilization group called Way Home (Put Domoi) began coordinating a new campaign aimed at grabbing the attention of Russian officials.
The heads of the Rostov, Belgorod, Leningrad, Kaliningrad, and Saratov regions soon found the comment sections of their live broadcasts flooded with messages calling for soldiers to be sent home. Writing on Telegram, Way Home’s administrators urged their subscribers to “turn up the heat en masse” by writing appeals to federal lawmakers and regional governors. At first, the group’s members even succeeded in securing meetings with government officials.
The women soon shifted from making appeals to taking action: they posted videos online, gave interviews, and, in November 2023, took part in a rally organized by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). They would later begin organizing protests themselves.
Veronika (name changed) joined the Way Home movement around this time, while on maternity leave from the Moscow children’s hospital where she works. She even participated in the KPRF-organized protest. “Why wouldn’t we?” asks the 35-year-old, who has two close relatives at the front. “[If] you meet with a lawmaker, what are they supposed to tell you? [Viktoria] Rodina from United Russia was the only one who gave it to us straight. She said: ‘Get out of here. I’ve got three children and my husband’s packed and ready.’ The rest just nodded like trained seals.”
At the end of November 2023, Way Home published a manifesto accusing the Russian government of turning its back on soldiers and their families, along with a petition against “indefinite mobilization.” Just days later, Telegram slapped a warning label on the Way Home channel that said “fake.” (Pro-Kremlin blogger Ilya Remeslo later took credit for reporting the group.) Soon after, the same label appeared on the movement’s regional channels, as well.
By this point, both Paulina Safronova and Maria Semyonova had joined the Way Home movement — and they didn’t shy away from public protests either. Paulina began talking to journalists regularly, ran a Telegram channel, and covered the group’s demonstrations. (In January 2024, Way Home had to issue a statement clarifying that she was not their spokesperson and that the movement did not share all of her views.)
“The first time we made a [public] appearance was when we recorded a video ahead of the president’s ‘Direct Line’ [in December 2023],” Maria recalls, referring to Putin’s traditional call-in show where he takes carefully scripted questions from Russian citizens and journalists. “Then we started laying flowers [at memorials to fallen soldiers] at the same time every Saturday.”
Maria gave her first interview as a Way Home activist just days before the Kremlin’s call-in show aired. “It would be good if Putin said during the Direct Line: ‘I was wrong, let’s start bringing your men home.’ But instead he’ll say something like, ‘Well, you’ll just have to endure and endure some more. A Russian is born, endures, and then dies,’” she predicted.
“I was not born to endure,” Maria continued. “I am losing my health, time, and youth. Our husbands are losing their limbs and their lives. Why on earth should we have to endure this?”
‘We were buried alive’
The demobilization movement was already beginning to show cracks in the fall of 2023. In October, State Duma Defense Committee chairman Andrey Kartapolov had said there were no plans to form a joint working group with demobilization advocates. At this point, some activist groups concluded that meeting with officials was pointless, while others continued to make appeals.
A few weeks later, Olga Katz railed against a rival demobilization group in a post on Telegram. Though she didn’t name the movement in question, the message was seemingly directed at Way Home.
“Due to the reckless actions of the ladies from another group, which has been overrun by Navalnyites and other provocateurs with their rallies and calls to shoot the commanders, our hands are now tied,” Katz wrote. “Thanks a lot to these ladies for everything, dammit. Not only have they achieved shit all except for articles in enemy media, but they’ve also made the work of all the other groups harder.”
Two days later, Katz announced that her brother had died at the front. “My heart is broken,” she wrote on Telegram. “I’m done.”
Before her brother’s death, Katz had pinned her hopes on Putin’s Direct Line. But despite the many questions demobilization activists sent in, the Russian president didn’t mention the fate of mobilized soldiers.
According to the Public Sociology Laboratory (PS LAB), an independent research group, this marked a turning point for Way Home. In a study based on in-depth interviews with the partners and relatives of Russian servicemen, including 13 Way Home activists, PS Lab found that after Putin failed to address the issue of demobilization, the group became overtly critical of the regime.
Asked how she felt after Putin’s call-in show, a woman named Mila told PS Lab, “We were buried alive and had nothing left to lose.”
“After this Direct Line, I went through another stage of radicalization. I even went out and picketed,” another woman said. “He [Putin] ignored [us]. We don’t exist for him. And that’s probably even more upsetting than if he had reacted negatively.”
In the new year, the Way Home Telegram channel began posting about other issues, expressing support for the protests in Bashkortostan over the arrest of prominent local activist Fayil Alsynov and urging subscribers to sign a petition calling for the release of seriously ill political prisoners.
Around the same time, Kartapolov, the Duma Defense Committee chairman, gave an interview where he dismissed the demands of mobilized soldiers’ relatives as “little schemes” run by Ukrainian and U.S. intelligence agencies.
The lawmaker’s remarks left Maria feeling insulted and outraged. “I’m supposed to kiss [the authorities’] boots after that? It was just too much,” she recalls.
Maria believes this was the moment when the demobilization movement really split into two camps — one that supported “the president and the state” and another calling for “demobilization and peace.”
‘Such is the bitter reality of life’
Veronika found Way Home’s political turn infuriating. Believing the Telegram channel’s messaging had become too aggressive, she warned the author of the critical posts “not to push an extremist agenda.”
“It would be constructive if the rhetoric were more moderate. You could go out with a ‘No to War’ poster, but what’s the use? They’ll jail you and then what?” Veronika argues. “I told her [the administrator], ‘Do you think the angrier the rhetoric, the more subscribers the channel gets?’ Those subscribers will realize you’re just mindlessly trashing the authorities and leave. There are loads of little channels like that.”
Way Home’s demands inevitably provoked a reaction from Russian propagandists. In November 2023, Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent anchor on state television, shared a post that included the group on a laundry list of “subversive actors” allegedly created by foreign intelligence agencies to publish “negative developments related to mobilized men and the course of the SVO [special military operation].”
Veronika tried to encourage her fellow activists to talk to the press, but found that many were too afraid to speak on the record. “Each one thought that she was the smartest one and could just sit back and see what everyone else does,” she sighs. Telegram labeling Way Home and its regional channels as “fake” also dealt a blow to the movement, Veronika says. “The regional groups were done for then,” she recalls. “The admins freaked out and deleted them.”
According to Veronika, Way Home’s demonstrations drew 50 people at best, even when participants traveled from remote regions to attend their rallies. This convinced her that they’d never have a “sufficient number” of people come out in protest.
“Each time, I hoped it would be easier the next time. Then in the morning I’d [get messages] saying, ‘The police came to my house yesterday, they said this is an unsanctioned rally and I shouldn’t go, so I won’t be going’ or ‘My husband forbade me; he told me to stay home and watch the kids,’” she recalls.
Veronika left Way Home in February 2024, having grown disillusioned with the movement’s efforts. She claims the Telegram channel’s administrators don’t take part in the protest actions they urge others to attend, and believes this is why the movement struggled to gain public sympathy and support. “It’s not right,” she says. “Innocent people are winding up behind bars and you don’t even want to show your face to share the responsibility. You can’t throw people who sympathize with you under the bus.”
One of the Telegram channel’s administrators, a graphic designer from Chelyabinsk named Valeria, said that she does in fact participate in the group’s actions — like laying flowers on the graves of unidentified soldiers. “There were cases when a young woman was widowed and then stopped fighting altogether, but there were also cases when a widow kept going to rallies so that others wouldn’t end up in her place,” she says. “Such is the bitter reality of life.”
Valeria was still in university when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She came across the Way Home Telegram channel after her father was called up in October 2022. “This was a terrible blow for me,” she says. “He went [to the enlistment office] to sort things out and never came back. He called us later and told us not to worry. Our lives have been filled with stress and worry for several years since then.”
According to Valeria, all of Way Home’s remaining members are “on edge.” She describes the general consensus among the women as follows: “Bring our loved ones home and be done with all this. We’re against the war, but we don’t speak about it openly since this is considered ‘discrediting’ [the armed forces]. We want everyone to live in peace, and our men have a right to life and family.”
‘These are not people who will fight’
Paulina Safronova also parted ways with the Way Home movement in February 2024. She made the announcement in a video, explaining that her position had always differed from that of many of the other girls” — since she “did not oppose the SVO” — but for a time, this hadn’t affected her involvement in the movement.
According to Paulina, other Way Home activists had begun to speculate that she was cooperating with law enforcement. “I was afraid of bringing harm to my husband, who joined up voluntarily, so I acted very carefully. I was trying to please both sides,” she says, explaining that the other women became suspicious after she failed to attend a protest marking 500 days of mobilization.
“My husband asked me not to go because there were reports about [a potential] terrorist attack. I told the girls about it,” she recalls. “This was the first time there were arrests at a [Way Home] rally. After that, they thought that I knew about it beforehand and was cooperating with someone.”
Veronika has her own suspicions. She claims that the police “started showing up” at the homes of Way Home activists after Paulina collected the personal information of 20 active members as part of an application to hold a public protest she submitted on the group’s behalf. “When I mentioned this [to the others], they said we’d been identified using surveillance cameras, but that’s a hassle,” Veronika says. “They could’ve just grabbed the sign-up sheet where we put down our names and addresses.”
Paulina says she was also threatened by the security forces, claiming they often had a car parked outside of her home. However, the police never came to her door. Maria Semyonova remembers being surveilled too. She says that in the run-up to Russia’s 2024 presidential vote and on polling day, a stranger tailed her everywhere. (Maria also defended Paulina, dismissing the accusations against her friend as “speculation.”)
Her involvement in the Way Home movement left Paulina “tired and burned out.” But that’s not the only reason she gave up her activism altogether. “My relationship with my husband was ruined because of this movement; he thought I was using him for publicity. So, I stepped back,” she explains.
“Many others have also burned out and grown tired, and some were intimidated,” she adds.
* * *
The Russian Justice Ministry added the Way Home movement to its blacklist of “foreign agents” in June 2024. But according to Paulina, the arrests and misdemeanor charges in connection with last September’s protest outside the Defense Ministry were the final straw for many of her former comrades. “[After] the protocols were drawn up, the girls stopped coming out, because everyone is scared now,” she explains.
Maria, who took part in that protest, found the small turnout disappointing. “By then I already understood everything, though I still believed that everyone should have the same goal: to fight for the freedom of the man they love,” she says. “As it turned out, not everyone did.”
Having “lost faith” in Way Home, Maria left the group too. “The movement reached its logical conclusion. It seemed to me they had nothing more to offer and had used their toolkit to the fullest,” she explains. “I thought it would be easier to find common ground with the other wives if I didn’t associate myself with a radical movement. But that assumption was mistaken,” she adds. “These are not people who will fight. It doesn’t matter whether you’re from Way Home or not.”
Maria still keeps in touch with some of the other soldiers’ relatives. She attends their court hearings and helps raise money to pay their fines. She says the women who were arrested outside the Defense Ministry are “angry and disappointed,” and many of them want to leave Russia. “They feel deeply hurt by their country and [fellow] citizens who are indifferent to their suffering.”
Today, the Way Home movement’s efforts have been reduced to laying flowers at memorials to fallen soldiers on Saturdays. “The authorities don’t hear us,” Valeria laments. “Many are afraid to join us because they think it’s illegal, and they’re afraid of the ‘foreign agent’ status. But we won’t stop. The only indicator of success is the return of our men, and as long as they’re out there, well, you get it.”
The way Veronika sees it, the moment when Way Home could have made its mark has passed. “If only half a skeleton crew shows up, there’s no point in carrying on,” she says. “If you ask Way Home, what [have you achieved]? They should be able to say: We’ve brought home this many soldiers, this many are in the process of being discharged, and we’ve helped this many people. There’s none of that.”
Veronika is now convinced that soldiers’ relatives “will achieve more in silence” and should work quietly with military lawyers and aid organizations. She also claims that she’s begun “acting alone” but refuses to share any details. “Way Home can burn in hell,” she says.
For her part, Maria still believes that Way Home’s protests were worthwhile. “We demonstrated that not everyone is swallowing [the Kremlin’s] agenda, which is served up under the guise of a magnificent dish,” she says. “In fact, it’s just a shit pie.”
Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers once a month. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read but relies on support from readers like you. Please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign.
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