Once influential, Russian soldiers’ mothers speak softly amid Ukraine war

In late March, Russia military authorities told Irina Chistyakova that her son, a conscripted soldier, had gone missing amid the war in Ukraine, and was probably dead. She refused to accept that.

Following the example of many brave soldiers’ mothers during Russia’s wars in Chechnya, she headed down to the battlefields determined to find him. And she did.

“I traveled 25,000 kilometers [15,500 miles], in Donbas, Mariupol, Crimea. I was bombed. I visited so many morgues. No one can understand what war is until you’ve seen it yourself,” she told Russian journalists Anton Rubin and Dasha Litvishko in interviews published on their YouTube channel, Razvorot (“Reversal”).

Like many others contacted by the Monitor for this story, Ms. Chistyakova was warned that foreign journalists will distort anything she says and does not want to be quoted to Razvorot, including a few scathing criticisms of Russia’s Defense Ministry. “I was doing the work of the Defense Ministry myself. It seems that I am the only person who needs my son. And I found out where he is. He is a prisoner of war in Ukraine.”