Russian women ask Vladimir Putin to bring soldiers home from Ukraine

In early January, young sports instructor Tatiana took a nine-hour bus ride to Moscow to visit the ministry of defence and demand her boyfriend, conscripted to fight in Ukraine, be allowed to return home. 

Her partner is among the 300,000 Russian men called up in a sweeping draft in September 2022 and deployed to the Ukrainian front. Now, 16 months on and with no end to their military service in sight, relatives are increasingly clamouring for their release.

Their growing frustration leaves the Kremlin in a bind, caught between the need to keep boots on the ground, nearly two years into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the political imperative to keep soldiers’ families, the symbolic backbone of patriotic support for the war, on side.

“I was never much into politics before,” Tatiana told the Financial Times shortly after her trip to Moscow, where she hand-delivered letters to the ministry. “But, damn, it’s been over a year. The guys are tired . . . As for us, our physical, emotional and mental resources are not limitless either.”

In Russia, men who sign up as “volunteers” to special army battalions for a wage are usually able to go home after six or nine months. Many convicts, recruited from prison by late warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, have been able to serve for six months and, their crimes pardoned, return home.

But no time limit has been set for recruits mobilised in September 2022. Statements by Russian officials have gradually signalled that mobilised men are expected to keep fighting until the war ends.

“You feel the injustice,” Tatiana said. For her partner on the battlefield it was “pretty disheartening to sit there and bid farewell to some convict who’s been at the front for six months and now gets to go home”.

The wives and girlfriends mostly began to demand the demobilisation of their men last…