Women on Russia’s military rolls are being summoned to enlistment offices in large numbers, and some are receiving unlawful summonses to reserve training. Here are their options.

Russian women on the military register have been summoned to enlistment offices in large numbers since the start of the summer. Some are receiving summonses to military reserve training — something the law explicitly prohibits. Mediazona drew attention to the problem. The outlet’s journalists also spoke with three women who have dealt with enlistment offices in recent weeks.

One of them, Oksana, received a summons in early July. The electronic registry listed the reason for the summons: “to take part in military reserve training.” Oksana had completed a university military training program in “radio relay and tropospheric communications,” but she had never received a summons before. She is pregnant. At the enlistment office, staff told her that summonses “are sent out by AI, and it can’t see gender,” but invited her to report in person anyway. The next day, the summons disappeared from the registry. Mediazona’s other two sources received summonses to “update their records.” In all three cases, nothing further has happened.

As far back as the fall of 2022, during the mobilization, the Defense Ministry said that “women are not being drafted, nor are there plans to draft them in the future.” The summonses sent out at the time were blamed on “technical errors.”

In 2026, however, women began to be recruited as contract soldiers. That May, female students at the Krasnoyarsk College of Radio Electronics and Information Technology were urged to join drone units. Women in the Tomsk region were also openly called on to join the Russian Armed Forces — provided they were “not pregnant at the time of signing the contract.” The ads circulated on district administrations’ social media accounts. In early June, recruitment drives targeting women also began in Perm.

Timofey Vaskin, who heads the legal department at the human rights project Shkola Prizyvnika (Conscript’s School), told Meduza that enlistment offices may have two reasons for their heightened interest in women:

• First, “in wartime, it’s important for the state to have a complete record of its entire mobilization pool.”
• Second, contract recruitment remains the main source of new troops — and women may be pressured into signing contracts during their visits to enlistment offices.

“Before the war, this wasn’t much of a problem, because nobody seriously intended to fight — and the enlistment offices kept sloppy military records. Now the situation has changed, now there’s interest, the offices have to make sure all the data is correct, and so they’re summoning women en masse,” Vaskin said.

He is convinced that summoning women to reserve training in particular is nothing more than a technical error: “The military registry still works very badly. It’s full of glitches, and it sends out improper summonses. We run into this regularly with men — with both conscripts and reservists.”

According to Vaskin, if a woman does go to the enlistment office, the visit will be limited to a records update and an offer to sign a contract. No one will be sent to reserve training. Even so, the possibility that women could be called up in the event of a mobilization shouldn’t be ruled out.

There’s no need to worry, Vaskin said: “You need to act with a cool head. Consult specialists before going to the enlistment office, because every situation is unique. And at the office, don’t sign anything you don’t need to.”

Vaskin said that refusing to report can result in restrictions and fines. Whether a woman goes to the enlistment office or refuses has no bearing on whether she could be mobilized. “The system is electronic. It will get to you either way,” he said.

Women can also try to get a summons voided remotely — if it’s a summons to reserve training: “A complaint against that kind of summons has to be filed with the military commissariat [i.e., the enlistment office] or the military prosecutor’s office. But most likely that’s only a short-term fix. And if the enlistment office’s real goal is to get the woman to come in and update all of her military-registration data, it will simply issue a new summons, this time to update her records.”

The most important thing in situations like these, Vaskin said, is to read carefully before signing: “And don’t sign anything you don’t understand. Read everything carefully. If there’s something you can’t make sense of — the meaning of certain words or phrases — then don’t sign anything until you’ve consulted a lawyer.”