Lidiya Yegorova pickets in front of the Defence Ministry building on 21 September 2025. Photo: Paulina Safronova / Telegram
The mother of a mobilised Russian soldier was detained in Moscow on Sunday while staging a solo picket to mark the third anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s mobilisation order, according to a Telegram post by Paulina Safronova, the wife of another soldier.
Lidiya Yegorova stood in front of the Russian Defence Ministry building with a handmade sign reading “Freedom to the mobilised 21.09.2022 — 21.09.2025”, marking the third anniversary of the so-called "partial mobilisation”, a mass conscription effort launched on 21 September 2022 in which at least 300,000 soldiers have been drafted to fight in Ukraine.
Although the Russian authorities announced the end of mobilisation on 31 October 2022, no decree officially ending it has ever been issued, and drafted soldiers have been serving indefinitely ever since.
“I am the mother of a conscript who has been at war for three years, who was seriously wounded, who has not been allowed to go home,” Yegorova said, urging the Defence Ministry to “come to its senses” and “bring our boys back”.
A video posted by Safronova shows police officers detaining Yegorova by force and escorting her to a police car. Yegorova spent the night at the police station and is expected to be charged with a misdemeanour for resisting arrest on Monday, according to Safronova’s channel.
Amid reports of conscripts being forced into signing contracts with the Defence Ministry against their will, repeated protests by the wives and mothers of conscripts have so far failed to bring about the return of their husbands and sons from the war, as Russia continues to stifle any attempts at dissent.
“Last year, solo pickets by relatives of mobilised soldiers were ‘allowed’,” Maria Semyonova, another soldier’s wife demanding her husband’s return home, wrote on her Telegram channel on Sunday.
Semyonova added that she had personally picketed in front of the Defence Ministry and the Presidential Administration in previous years without being detained by the police. “But now, that’s it — they’re telling us to pipe down.”