PERSONAL: 'Russia is waking up' - a tango-dancing soldier's wife finds purpose on Russian home front

Record ID: 1756451

  • Title: PERSONAL: 'Russia is waking up' - a tango-dancing soldier's wife finds purpose on Russian home front
  • Date: 13th December 2023
  • Summary: MOSCOW, RUSSIA (DECEMBER 7, 2023) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (Russian) WIFE OF VOLUNTARILY MOBILISED RUSSIAN SOLDIER, NATALIA YERMAKOVA, SAYING: "When he arrived home with an injury - between his two surgeries – we decided to have a church wedding. But in our (Russian) territory it is not possible to arrange a church wedding right away. You need to be (officially) married at a registry office first. And so, we did, but have not arranged for a church marriage yet. This is what we are going to do next, by all means."
  • Embargoed: 27th December 2023 09:13
  • Keywords: Ukraine crisis aid mobilisation special military operation tango volunteers
  • Location: MOSCOW AND MOSCOW REGION, RUSSIA / UNIDENTIFIED LOCATION
  • City: MOSCOW AND MOSCOW REGION, RUSSIA / UNIDENTIFIED LOCATION
  • Country: Russia
  • Topics: Conflicts/War/Peace,Europe
  • Reuters ID: LVA009497111122023RP1
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9
  • Story Text: Natalia Yermakova's husband has been fighting in Ukraine for over a year after rushing to respond to President Vladimir Putin's mobilisation call. He has since been wounded, operated on, and sent back to the front.
    Motivated by patriotism and a desire to help Alexander, her husband with whom she says she shares a love of tango dancing, Yermakova is now doing her own bit for what she calls Russia's "special military operation": toiling as a volunteer in a "Family Battalion."
    One of a group of around 40 mostly female relatives of mobilised men in Moscow who give up their time twice or three times a week, she threads camouflage netting, makes signs to mark minefields, gathers candles to be used in trenches and dug-outs, and puts food parcels together.
    As Vladimir Putin positions himself to win a fifth presidential term in March, it is people like Yermakova who like many Russians supports the war, who he is relying on to hold his support base together.
    Her work takes place in an office belonging to the ruling United Russia party which is adorned with the country's red, blue and white flag and portraits of politicians such as Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, his predecessor, hang on the wall.
    There are other similar groups working in the Russian capital, said Yermakova.
    The relatives take turns to accompany the deliveries they assemble - in a more than 30-year-old van - to the Russian military in what she calls "the new territories."
    "We really want to support them (our husbands) morally and emotionally and send them a message of kindness and a message that what they are doing there is needed by people here," Yermakova told Reuters, while taking a break from threading a giant camouflage net.
    Some wives of Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine are demanding that their husbands, who they say have not been given enough breaks to spend time with their own families, be demobilised and their places taken by others.
    But Yermakova, 37, who was able to spend some time with her own husband after he spent several months recuperating in Moscow after an operation on his leg and even fit in a bit of tango dancing once he was well enough, did not share that concern.
    "If our government decides to act in such a way it means that's the way it has to be," said Yermakova, who said she had a 10-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter from a previous relationship.
    "I believe that Russia is waking up, waking up from its sleep, and understands that it (the war) is not just happening for no reason and that there are compelling reasons for it."
    That's a reference to the Kremlin's preferred narrative which casts the conflict as part of wider existential struggle for a new fairer world order against the U.S.-led West.
    The West's allegation that it is a colonial-style war of conquest aimed at capturing more territory finds little purchase among Russians like Yermakova who accuse Ukraine of mistreating Russian speakers in the east since 2014 when a Russian-backed uprising erupted there. Kyiv denies the charge.
    Yermakova said that threading camouflage nets to help conceal trenches and to fit on soldiers' helmets was the volunteers' main task because it was something that could help save their husbands' lives by keeping them safe from enemy drones.
    She and others had also started sewing bandages and baked apple and cabbage pies to send to their men.
    Yermakova said she had made several delivery runs, describing the area close to the frontline as "a different world."
    The thread of tango dancing has run through their wartime life, she said.
    When Alexander, 32, had a 24-hour leave period in Ukraine's eastern Luhansk region in February, she described spending a night with him in an evacuated hospital where she changed into a dress, turned on some music, and they both danced a tango.
    And when they got married in a civil ceremony around six months ago when he was injured and on leave in Moscow, tango dancing featured again even though he was still walking with a stick.
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