Moscow: A growing number of Russian women have been asked by authorities to accompany their husbands in the war zone in Ukraine in a move which critics of President Putin feel is ‘draconian’ in nature.
Natalia Yermakova presents such a case. Her husband, Alexander, who wounded leg while fighting in Ukraine for over a year, was operated and then sent to the war ravaged country again.
Alexander had no option but to respond to President Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation call as a volunteer. Natalia was also made party to what Russia calls its “special military operation” against Ukraine. She was asked to toil as a volunteer in a “Family Battalion” in Moscow.
She is one among 40 mostly female relatives of mobilised men, who are assigned the task of camouflage netting, making signs to mark minefields, gathering candles to be used in dug-outs, and putting food parcels together in their free time.
Vladimir Putin is facing presidential polls in March and eyeing a fifth term in power, positioning himself as the right leader to intensify a military campaign that the West criticises as a ‘colonial-style war of aggression.’
Powerful Putin relies on several women like Yermakova to hold his support base together.
She works at the office of the ruling United Russia party, adorned with Russia’s red, blue and white flag and portraits of politicians such as Putin.
According to her, there are similar groups working around Moscow. The relatives take turns accompanying the deliveries they assemble – in a more-than-30-year-old van – to the Russian military in what Yermakova calls “the new territories” – Ukrainian land annexed by Russia.
“Our job is to support soldiers morally and emotionally,” Yermakova says while threading a giant camouflage net.
Frequent demands come from some wives of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine that their husbands be demobilised and their places taken by others.
The 37-year-old Yermakova, 37, says she was able to be with her own husband for some time after he spent several months recuperating in Moscow following an operation on his leg.
“Russsia understands reasons for the war to happen,” she says.
That’s a reference to the Kremlin’s narrative that the conflict is part of a wider existential struggle for a fairer world order against what Putin sees as a decadent West bent on containing Russia. The West brands Russia’s actions in Ukraine as a brutal and unprovoked land grab, but this view finds little purchase among Russians like Yermakova. They accuse Ukraine of mistreating Russian speakers in the east since 2014 when a Russian-backed uprising erupted there. Kyiv denies the charge.
Yermakova said threading camouflage nets to help conceal trenches and to fit on soldiers’ helmets was the volunteers’ main task because it could help save their husbands’ lives by keeping them safe from enemy drones.
She and others have also started sewing bandages and baking apple and cabbage pies to send to their men.
Yermakova said she had made several delivery runs, describing the area close to the frontline as “a different world”.
Despite the doom and gloom, Yermakova says she and her husband tried to bring a bit of normality to their lives by practising tango dancing, something they both loved, on the rare occasions they saw each other.