The Kremlin is paying the wives of frontline soldiers not to engage in protests against their husbands’ indefinite deployments, even as Russian leader Vladimir Putin orders up 170,000 more troops to fight in Ukraine.
Russian authorities are “attempting to quash public dissent by wives of deploying Russian soldiers, including by attempting to pay them off and discrediting them online,” read an intelligence briefing posted by the British Ministry of Defense on X Saturday.
A prominent online group representing soldiers’ wives published a manifesto against “indefinite mobilization,” on Monday, according to the post from Defense Intelligence.
Three days later, the protest group was pinned with a “fake” warning label, “likely at the instigation of pro-Kremlin actors,” the briefing said.
Many of those soldiers were mobilized in September 2022, and have now been at the front line for more than a year, the Defense Ministry said.
The payoffs come as recent polls found that more than 74 percent of Russians favor peace talks to end the war in Ukraine, according to Britain’s The Independent.
The suppression comes amid a new deployment of 170,000 soldiers who are heading to places like Maryinka, a town in eastern Ukraine which has been all but destroyed by more than a year of fighting.
Russian soldiers claimed finally to have taken the town on Saturday, even though the abandoned area which was once home to 10,000 residents is little more than a pile of rubble.
There are no civilians left in the town, according to reports.
Control over the town remained uncertain, with Ukraine’s General Staff claiming that Russian forces had been unsuccessful in attempts to overtake neighboring villages in the area but saying nothing of troop movements in the town itself.
For its part, Russia’s Defense MInistry made no mention of Mayrinka in its communications.
The total number of Russian troops in Ukraine rose just above 1.32 million with the new deployment, according to reports.
Meanwhile, in Russia-occupied Zaporizhzhia, a nuclear power plant lost its power supply after the last remaining line to it from Ukrainian-controlled territory was disrupted.
It has since been repaired, the energy ministry said on Saturday, according to reports.
The Ukraine plant was occupied by Russia in March 2022 and is no longer generating power, but it needs a supply of electricity to cool one of its four reactors which is in a state of ‘hot conservation’ — meaning it has not fully been shut down.