Russian Wives Threaten to Go to Ukraine Front Line and Bring Soldiers Home

Some wives of mobilized Russian soldiers are reportedly threatening to go to the front line in Ukraine to bring their husbands back home after an operation left multiple wounded, according to footage circulating on social media.

In the video, published on the Telegram channel of media outlet Verstka, one woman can be heard telling military officials to return their husbands or they'll "tear them apart."

According to the outlet, more than 20 relatives of the Russian men, who were drafted to fight in Ukraine as part of President Vladimir Putin's September 21 partial mobilization order, went to a military unit in the town of Valuyki in Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine, on November 9, demanding answers.

The relatives, from Russia's Voronezh, Kursk and Belgorod regions, said the men had come under attack in Makiivka, a city in Ukraine's Donetsk region. They said many were wounded and demanded their husbands be returned home to Russia.

Survivors of that attack are now reportedly attempting to walk back home to Russia's Belgorod region—a distance of some 150 kilometers—and many are carrying the wounded on their backs.

All the men are attached to the "non-existent" unit 11097, their relatives said.

The women asked Russian military officers to bring the mobilized soldiers back to Russia by car, threatening to go to Ukraine themselves to bring them home should the military refuse to help.

"I'm ready to tear them apart. They have to do something, they have to make a decision, they have to get them out of there. We want them to be taken out as they have a lot of wounded," one of the women told Verstka.

It's one of a number of examples of reports in recent days of soldiers' relatives expressing their anger at the Russian military.

A video allegedly showing Russian soldiers' wives demanding answers following the apparent retreat of Putin's forces from the city of Kherson in Ukraine has gone viral.

The clip was shared on Twitter by user Dmitri, who is with WarTranslated, an independent project concerned with translating various materials about the war into English.

It shows a group of women speaking in a meeting to a man who is supposedly a city administrator about the ongoing conflict.

"Wives of mobilised soldiers from Kursk caught in an argument with the city administration," Dmitri wrote as a caption.

"The men were sent to the front line, their units were destroyed piece by piece, so some retreated to Starobilsk. Note the language used by the administration representative," he wrote.

Latvia-based Russian-language news outlet Meduza also reported on Thursday that relatives of Russian men who were mobilized and sent to Ukraine with little to no training demanded that they be returned home.

Residents of Russia's Vologda said in their appeal addressed to the regional governor that their relatives, mobilized in early October, were sent to Ukraine's Luhansk region and transferred to the front line near Svatovo on November 1.

"The guys were trapped in a fire trap, they were killed by both the enemy and our Russian army," the relatives said, as they called on Russian authorities to bring their husbands and sons home.

They asked that Russian authorities not "wait until everyone is cut down in this bloody meat grinder."

Newsweek has not been able to independently verify when the footage was taken.