ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- It was a small protest and a short one.
When it was over, long-stemmed carnations left by participants lay on the stone surrounding the eternal flame memorial in St. Petersburg, along with a white ribbon bearing an inscription: "It is time to bring the mobilized soldiers home."
The January 20 gathering brought a couple dozen women to the monument on the city's Field of Mars, a few of them with small children in tow. Some, covering their faces, held signs with messages such as "Women for Life: 15 Months Without Leave. Without Their Families."
It was organized by The Way Home, a Telegram channel uniting relatives of Russian men who were called up to fight in Russia's invasion of Ukraine -- a grassroots effort to bring them home from a war that, in addition to killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian troops and civilians, has left more than 300,000 Russian troops dead or wounded, according to Western estimates.
The channel, which has nearly 40,000 subscribers, has called for such demonstrations, at which the women wear white head scarves, around the country every Saturday for the foreseeable future.
"We don't intend to stop," read the group's call for the protests. "We, the relatives of the mobilized and those who are not indifferent to our misfortune, will go and place flowers on eternal flames. These flowers do not just symbolize our problem. We would like to be joined by widows, no matter how hard that is for them. Together we are prepared to honor the memory of your slain relatives and to share your loss. No one should remain alone with their misfortune and our grief should not remain a secret."
During the first weekly protests, on January 6, small groups gathered in at least 14 cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Nearly two years after Russia unleashed its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the end of the war is not in sight. And the growing discontent of the relatives of mobilized soldiers -- many of whom support the war itself, if not the way Russian soldiers have been treated -- is threatening to disrupt domestic politics ahead of the March election in which authoritarian President Vladimir Putin, 71, is set to secure a fifth term. It runs counter to the Kremlin's narrative of a country enthusiastically united behind the man who has held the reins of power as president or prime minister for a quarter-century.
"The president will be reelected because we do not have honest elections," one woman at the St. Petersburg protest, who asked that her identity be withheld out of fear of persecution for speaking out, told RFE/RL's North.Realities. "Wars end through peace talks. Any war just benefits the rich, while ordinary people, draped in flags, fill the cemeteries."
From Camouflage Nets To Protest
The woman's husband was mobilized in September 2022, days after Putin announced a call-up in the wake of successful Ukrainian efforts to push back against the Russian invasion.
"My husband is in the artillery now," she said. "He doesn't tell me anything specific because he doesn't want me to worry. If he thinks it is better that I don't know, then so be it."
In the early days after her husband was mobilized, the woman joined the wives, partners, and mothers of other soldiers gathering humanitarian aid and weaving camouflage nets for use on the front lines. But as the months dragged on and the recruiters' promises that her husband would return after six months proved empty, she became anxious. That's when she found The Way Home on Telegram and began walking the path from chatting with like-minded women online to meeting up with them to lay flowers at the eternal flame.
She said she stopped communicating with the women who are still making camouflage nets.
"There are mothers who say their son should be there because they have to defend their homeland," she said. "Even the old women who need someone to care for them speak about 'defending.' They might be able to pull their sons out of the trenches because of their illnesses, but they remain convinced that they have to be at the front."
In recent months, the rhetoric on The Way Home channel has changed noticeably. At first, the group stressed that its members were not against the war but were only asking that their relatives be rotated out and others sent to relieve them. Now, however, The Way Home is calling for an end to the war. In their notice for the January 20 protests, they called for "all those who are not thrilled about the war" to join them.
"At one point you bravely protested to try to stop the war," the announcement said. "Now we are asking you to protest with us."
The announcement also invited representatives of families that have not been directly affected by the war to join them.
"Don't believe the fairy tales you see on television," it told them. "We have long known they aren't true."
Although the Russian government does not release casualty figures from the war, journalists from Mediazona and the BBC have reported that they have identified at least 42,284 Russian combatants who have been killed, including at least 5,089 mobilized soldiers and 7,810 convicts who were released from prison to fight. Western intelligence agencies have estimated that more than 300,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the start of the full-scale invasion.
'You Don't Get Out Alive'
Another woman at the January 16 protest in St. Petersburg said her 25-year-old son was serving as an infantryman in Ukraine, although his military service had been with an engineering unit. He has been in Ukraine since the spring of 2023 without a single leave.
Her son, she said, is currently in the hospital, having lost the little finger on his left hand. When she visited him there recently, she added, he told her little about what he'd seen.
"He doesn't tell me how bad it has been," she said. "He doesn't tell me he wants to get out because he knows that where he has been fighting, you don't get out alive."
At that point, the woman in St. Petersburg said, she joined The Way Home.
"It is a group without leaders," she explained. "There are various people there -- some active, some passive. We try to rouse the more passive ones. Everything is decided collectively. Sometimes we argue, sometimes we curse one another."
The Way Home protest in St. Petersburg on January 13 was canceled, as local activists instead went to a presidential campaign event in support of anti-war liberal and former parliament deputy Boris Nadezhdin.
Both women from the St. Petersburg protest told RFE/RL they have no illusions about the March presidential election. After the vote, they said, Putin will have a free hand, and Russia's manpower problem in Ukraine will likely be even more acute.
