Thread by @khodorkovsky_en

Finally, Putin faces a challenge he can’t easily silence or ignore:

Mothers and wives demanding the return of their conscripted family members

He is clearly scared — as he should be:🧵

The conscripts were sent to fight in Ukraine without any indication of how long they would be there, and their wives and mothers are now realizing that their loved ones are staying at the front until the war is over 2/16

They have tried to organize protests in Moscow, St Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Chelyabinsk, Krasnoyarsk and other cities, but protests in Russia need municipal government approval, and their applications were rejected under the pretext of “COVID restrictions” 3/16

The protests aren’t openly against the war right now. Instead, the women are demanding that their husbands and sons, specifically, be sent home from Ukraine. They coordinate and support each other on social media 4/16

These demands are clever from a strategic point of view — by avoiding direct criticism of the government and military, they avoid falling foul of the repressive and illegitimate laws against “discrediting” the war effort 5/16

It’s counter-intuitive, but because their protests are not explicitly anti-war, they present a bigger challenge to the Kremlin, and the regime is forced to take more nuanced approach instead of using it’s usual playbook and suppressing the dissent by force 6/16

The Kremlin responded with a variety of measures, including trying to buy them off and offering higher compensation for service members 7/16

Russian social media platforms are removing groups for soldiers’ family members to isolate them from each other. Some of the wives and mothers have even been visited at home by police, just to make sure they don’t do anything too rash 8/16

Why is Putin so hell bent on silencing them? It’s because he’s afraid the millions of people whose loved ones were sent to war will reach the only logical conclusion: to get their men back, the war has to end, which inevitably means the end of Putin’s reign 9/16

These are women who are mostly indifferent to politics. But their hand has been forced, because their loved ones have been taken away from them indefinitely — and they’re only going to get angrier 10/16

Most of these women were completely apolitical until now, and they may not be fully aware of how far the regime will go to silence dissent. Their loyalist approach is doomed to fail, because the only way to bring the conscripts home alive is to end the war 11/16

They seem to be realizing this, and recently appealed to the people of Russia for support in an open letter which contained a list of their grievances — and direct criticism of Putin, who has declared 2024 ‘the year of family’ 12/16agents.media/zheny-mobilizo…

Putin and his lackeys are the only people who benefit from the war. Not the soldiers freezing in foxholes, not the wives and mothers anxiously wishing for their return – and of course, not the innocent victims in Ukraine 13/16

None of the regime’s lies about why the war is being fought stand up to any kind of scrutiny. Ukraine doesn’t need “denazification”, NATO is not banging on Russia’s gates, there’s no foreign army waiting to march into Moscow 14/16

When hundreds of thousands of people whose loved ones have been press-ganged into Putin’s army realize this and go out in force to demand a stop to the war, the illusion of Putin as a beloved leader will be irreparably shattered 15/16

Once that genie is out of the bottle, it won’t go back in. And when it reaches that point, even the Kremlin’s most experienced and skilled liars will have a hard time convincing Russian citizens that the war is in their interests. 16/16

Watch my detailed video about this here: (English subtitles available)