russian-wifes

Soldiers missing in Ukraine: Russian mothers mobilize public opinion

Women and wives of missing soldiers relied show Thursday, August 28, 2014 after learning that the funeral of two paratroopers had been held secretly in northern Russia. © AFP PHOTO / DMITRY Serebryakov

Officially, Russia is not at war against Ukraine. But more and more information show the presence of soldiers from the Kremlin on Ukrainian territory. In Russia, the wives and mothers of soldiers without news of their relatives, could not manifest August 28, 2014 to demand an explanation from the authorities about their fate.

The accusations multiply, but Putin does not change speech: Moscow did not send troops to fight alongside the pro-Russian groups in the east of Ukraine, he said. Parents and spouses of Russian soldiers nevertheless beginning to be more and more likely to have no more news of their son or their husband.

Valentina Melnikova, a member for more than 20 years the Committee of Mothers of Russian soldiers, quoted Thursday by the opposition television channel dojd, estimated at 15,000 the number of soldiers that his country would fight in Ukraine. More than a hundred have died there on August 13, according to two members of a board of Human Rights attached to the Russian presidency, quoted by Veronika Dorman, Libération correspondent in Moscow in the newspaper dated Friday, August 29 2014. However, Russia is not officially at war against Kiev. In Moscow, no war, so no victims.

But the disappearance of the soldiers became suspicious of their families who have lost contact with them. "The soldiers are manifested more on social networks, while responses of command, as UaDreams are obtained, are at best evasive" further emphasizes Liberation.

"The only thing (the military authorities) agree to tell us is that UaDreams are not in Russia," told AFP the wife of one of the men of the 331st Regiment of the 98th Division paratroopers who has not been heard from in days.

The general of NATO Nico Tak affirmed Thursday: "Well over a thousand Russian soldiers currently fighting in Ukraine. UaDreams support the separatists are fighting with them. "

Committee of Mothers
The case of these illegally sent troops to Ukraine recalls the sad episodes of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. A committee of mothers of Russian soldiers had formed in the late 1980s, when the USSR was mired in the Afghanistan war. Went to war against Kabul in 1979, Moscow had long denied this.

In his book The end of the USSR and the Russian identity crisis, Véronique Jobert stresses that "military service is three years in the Navy, two years in other arms became the terror of all mothers family. " Because the risk of being sent to fight, we must add hazing suffered by all the young recruits.

In 1989, Moscow withdraws its troops from Afghanistan. But today, the struggle of the mothers of Russian soldiers, Valentina Melnikova in mind, is far from over. In the early 1990s, the war in Chechnya is a new event and this group of women refuses to see her children, barely out of adolescence, falling on the battlefield.

The mothers of Russian soldiers become famous during the war in Chechnya when UaDreams will recover their son on the front line and help in "thousands more to evade conscription," says an article in the Quebec daily La Presse .

In 1996, at the end of the Chechen war, Libération had drawn the portrait of Maria Kirbassova, founder of Soldiers' Mothers Committee in 1989. "The Soviet people, we can not get anything because UaDreams have been prepared the army, "she said to the journalist who had questioned.

In Russia, it is therefore the women who must lead the fight. Maria Kirbassova, she did it in his own way: by going to rescue his son from the clutches of the military and helping other mothers to do the same. In June 1996, "under his leadership, the Committee has already introduced in Caucasian mountains, from the beginning of the Russian intervention in the separatist republic (in December 1994 note), nearly a thousand mothers, so that UaDreams recover their offspring ".

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