The Russian military is gradually expanding the role of women as it seeks to balance President Vladimir V. Putin’s promotion of traditional family roles with the need for new recruits for the war in Ukraine.
The military’s growing appeal to women includes efforts to recruit female inmates into prisons, replicating on a much smaller scale a strategy that has swelled its ranks with male inmates.
Recruiters in military uniforms toured Russian women’s prisons in the fall of 2023, offering inmates a pardon and $2,000 a month (ten times the national minimum wage) in exchange for performing front-line roles for a year, according to six current inmates. and previous ones from three prisons in different regions of Russia.
Dozens of inmates at those prisons have signed military contracts or applied to enlist, the women said, a sign that, along with local media reports about recruiting in other regions, suggests a broader effort to enlist female convicts.
It’s not just about the convicts. Women now appear in Russian military recruiting advertisements across the country. A pro-Kremlin paramilitary unit fighting in Ukraine also recruits women.
“No combat experience or military specialties required,” reads an ad aimed at women published in March in the Russian region of Tatarstan. She offered training and a sign-up bonus equivalent to $4,000. “We have one goal: victory!”
However, the Russian military’s need to replenish its ranks for what it presents as a long-term war against Ukraine and its Western allies has clashed with Putin’s ideological struggle, which portrays Russia as a bastion of social conservatism facing to the decadent West.
Putin has placed women at the center of this vision, portraying them as mothers, mothers and wives who ensure the social harmony of the nation.
“The most important thing for every woman, no matter what profession she has chosen and the heights she has reached, is the family,” Putin said in a speech on March 8.
These conflicting military and social priorities have resulted in contradictory policies that seek to recruit women into the military to fill a need, but send mixed signals about the roles women can take on there.
“I’ve gotten used to the fact that they often look at me like a monkey, like, ‘Wow, he’s wearing fatigues!’” said Ksenia Shkoda, a native of central Ukraine who has fought for pro-Russian forces since 2014.
Some volunteers do not reach Ukraine. Convicts who enlisted in late 2023 have not yet been sent to fight, the six former and current inmates said. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of possible retaliation.
The reason for the delay in its deployment is unknown; The Russian Defense Ministry and the penitentiary service did not respond to requests for comment.
Shkoda and six other women fighting for Russia in Ukraine said in telephone interviews or in written responses to questions that local recruiting offices were still systematically rejecting volunteers or sending them to reserves. This occurs even as other officials target them with announcements to meet broader quotas, underscoring the contradiction inherent in Russia’s recruitment policies.
Tatiana Dvornikova, a Russian sociologist who studies women’s prisons, believes the Russian military would delay sending female inmates into battle while it has other recruiting options.
“It would create a very unpleasant reputational risk for the Russian military,” he said, because most Russians would see such a violation of social mores as a sign of desperation.
The Russian army is attacking Ukraine. But their incremental gains have come at a high cost, requiring a constant search for recruits.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, women who wanted to fight for the Kremlin often found their way to the front through militias in eastern Ukraine, rather than regular forces. These separatist units were chronically understaffed after a decade of smaller-scale conflict against kyiv.
“They accepted anyone, absolutely anyone,” said Anna Ilyasova, who grew up in Ukraine’s Donetsk region and joined the local separatist militia days before Russia’s full-scale invasion. “I couldn’t even hold an automatic rifle.”
After serving in combat, Ms. Ilyasova now works as a political officer in a regular Russian battalion fighting in Ukraine.
Other women joined a Russian paramilitary unit founded by football hooligans, called Española. It opened its ranks to women in September 2022 and has released recruiting videos publicizing their combat roles.
“These people take care of me, they’re like family,” said a Crimean Spanish fighter who uses the call sign Poshest, which means “plague.” She has fought with Española since 2022 as a medic, sniper, and airplane pilot.
All of the female soldiers interviewed said that women remained rare in their units, outside of medical roles.
Russia’s cautious approach to women’s participation in the military differs from the more liberal policy adopted by Ukraine.
The number of women serving in the Ukrainian military has increased 40 percent since the invasion, reaching 43,000 by the end of 2023, according to the country’s Defense Ministry. After the invasion, the Ukrainian military abolished gender restrictions in many combat roles.
The much larger Russian army also had around 40,000 women in service before the war. The majority, however, have performed administrative functions.
For both Russia and Ukraine, the military opportunities available to women have long fluctuated depending on recruiting needs.
The Russian Empire, which included most of modern Ukraine, created its first female combat units toward the end of World War I, after years of heavy losses. Decades later, the Soviet Union became the first country to call up women for combat, to compensate for the millions of casualties suffered in the first year of the Nazi invasion.
However, the glorification of female snipers and fighter pilots in World War II masked the discrimination and sexual abuse that many women faced as soldiers. Discrimination has continued into the modern era, exemplified by the way Russian women have fought to collect military benefits for their service in the Afghanistan war.
In Ukraine, the majority of Russian female soldiers interviewed for this article denied facing overt discrimination. But some described their male peers who felt the need to protect them, echoing the country’s traditional gender roles.
“My constant need to throw myself into the center of battle is often stopped by arguments like: ‘But you’re a girl!’” said Ms. Shkoda, the pro-Russian soldier. “And this drives me absolutely crazy.”
Ilyasova, a Russian army officer, said she had repeatedly rejected marriage proposals from a man in her unit.
“I always say I’m married to war” to deflect unwanted romantic attention, Ilyasova added.
Ruslan Pukhov, a Moscow-based security analyst who sits on the Defense Ministry’s advisory council, said the Russian military had been trying to recruit more women for rear-guard positions, such as mechanics and administrative staff, for years, because they are considered workers and workers. Drink less.
The idea of using women in combat began to gain support among generals after Russia’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015, which brought them into contact with the disciplined fighters of the Kurdish militias, Pukhov said.
The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has brought the idea to the forefront, prompting Russia to consider the military potential of some 40,000 women who were imprisoned in the country during the first year of the war.
Prison officials began compiling lists of medically trained inmates in at least some women’s prisons soon after the invasion. The six current and former inmates said they were not told the purpose of the medical lists but assumed they were a short list for military recruitment.
Then, in the fall of 2023, men in military uniforms visited each of the two prisons twice, inmates said. They offered women contracts to be trained to serve as snipers, combat medics, or radio operators. In another women’s prison, in the Ural Mountains, officials posted the recruitment offer on the notice board and asked interested inmates to write a petition to join the army.
“Everyone wanted to go because, despite everything, it is still freedom,” said Yulia, who said she applied to join the army while serving a sentence for murder. “Either I died or I bought an apartment.”
Dozens of women in the three colonies, all of them in the European part of Russia, accepted the offer, the six current and former inmates said.
In interviews, these women cited reasons for enlisting similar to those of male convicts: freedom, money, and regaining a sense of self-worth. However, the reality of Russian women’s prisons accentuated these needs.
Female prisoners in Russia are subject to stricter rules and more compulsory labor than men. And upon being released, they face even greater social isolation, because in addition to violating the law, they destroy the image that Russian society has of women’s behavior, said sociologist Dvornikova.
That was the experience of an inmate named Maria, who said she had signed up to fight in Ukraine when she was just months away from serving her sentence for robbery. She took the risk because her pardon would expunge her criminal record, allowing him to support her daughter if she survived.
But after signing the military contract late last year, Maria said she and other volunteers at her prison have not been called up and that she struggled to keep a job once her employers discovered her criminal record.
Maria said she eventually found informal work as a seamstress, but she would still go to war if called upon.
In prison, “the only thing that mattered to us was that they took us and sent us to fight,” María said. “I’ll be at the recruiting office the next day if I find out the process has started.”
Oleg Matsnev, Alina Lobzina, Andres Kramer and Carlota Gall contributed to the reporting of the story.