“I want a woman”. How Russian soldiers harass women on trains and planes while returning from the front

In December 2023, when 23-year-old Oksana entered her train compartment on the Voronezh to St. Petersburg route, she saw a camouflage uniform hanging on a hook next to one of the bunks. A man, already changed into shorts and a t-shirt, was sitting nearby.

“I realised I’d be travelling with men, as the ticket was purchased by a company,” Oksana recounts. “Then the second man arrived; he looked like a teacher or professor and immediately started reading a book.”

As the train pulled out of the station, Oksana recalls immediately feeling uneasy and spending some time in the corridor. Later, she brewed herself some coffee and returned to her compartment. The soldier resembled Philipp Kirkorov, a famous Russian pop singer, Oksana remembers: nearly two meters tall, with large, seemingly made-up eyes, and of average build. He appeared to be around 40 years old.

“I decided to ask where he was headed, hoping he’d get off before St. Petersburg,” the young woman says. “We struck up a conversation: at first more or less casual, about different cities, and I tried not to encourage it and let it fizzle out.”

The exact opposite happened: the soldier began agitatedly recounting that he was returning from the Donetsk region. While Oksana continued sipping her coffee, trying not to react, the second man in the compartment put down his book and started attentively listening to his travel companion.

“There was no stopping him; he described how they fought there, how he was wounded, and now visits military enlistment offices, doing paperwork,” Oksana continues. “Then he started getting worked up, reliving his combat experience, so to speak. I tried my hardest not to listen to him; it seemed he mostly spoke about his dissatisfaction with how the Ministry of Defence had organised things. He lashed out at both the ‘Khohols’ [a derogatory term for Ukrainians] and Russian structures: how badly everything was set up and how difficult it was to fight. He talked non-stop for about twenty minutes, with a crazed look in his eyes as he relived it all.”

After a while, Oksana left the compartment again: “I felt very awkward and angry; I didn’t know how I’d make it through another half a day and night there with them.” Having caught her breath, the young woman approached the conductor.

“I looked like a child at that moment, small and thin,” she says. “She [the conductor] immediately agreed this wasn’t right. She asked how this happened and started searching her system for a place to move me to. A few stations later, a man was leaving an all-female compartment, and I was placed there.”

“I’m a Defender!“. Harassment of fellow passengers

In August 2022, 23-year-old Irina Buyakas found herself in a similar situation when she boarded a train from Krasnoyarsk to Sochi. Initially travelling alone, she was later joined by three men. Speaking to Mediazona, she explains it’s still difficult for her to recall those events.

“One commander and two other [soldiers]. From their conversations, I gathered they were heading to a specific place—I don’t remember where now—to transfer and go to the ‘special military operation’ [the official Russian term for the war in Ukraine]. One of them mentioned they had just been released from prison to go there. I thought to myself, ‘Everything should be okay; these are men, defenders; everything should be fine’.”

Meanwhile, Irina’s travel companions started drinking, “vodka, it seemed,” she continues. Sitting on the upper bunk with her chamomile tea, the men repeatedly invited her to come down, and eventually she agreed. One of the soldiers—the heaviest drinker—began asking Irina “strange questions” and then started getting handsy.

“I immediately pushed him away, saying, ‘Don’t you dare touch me.’ The second man didn’t react, while the third eventually started defending me, saying, ‘Stop it, don’t be impudent’,” she recalls.

The men continued drinking, and soon the soldier tried to touch Irina again.

“The one who drank the most started outright harassing me, making lewd comments,” she sighs. “I shoved him, he stumbled, and suddenly he whips out a knife! Standing over me, swaying, drilling me with his gaze. The one who defended me started fighting him—it was so wild, the whole compartment was shaking. I was pressed against the window while they brawled; the knife went flying, the second one smashed the first one’s face, blood everywhere.”

The conductor rushed over at the commotion, and passengers from the neighbouring compartment hid Irina, who fled the epicentre of the fight. The main troublemaker was “dragged out by his feet” into the train corridor; the police arrived and removed him at the next stop. “The other two even laughed, like, ‘Ha-ha, he didn’t make it’,” Buyakas recalls.

The neighbouring passengers who offered Irina help suggested she stay with them, but in the evening, the young woman decided to return to her seat. The soldiers were asleep, one right on the floor between the bunks. The compartment reeked of alcohol fumes.

At night, Irina heard the now-awake travel companions loudly discussing her appearance through her sleep-addled haze and again chose to leave. “I climbed down, and the one who’s ‘saved’ me suddenly says he objects. Now he starts making passes at me. All the while telling me about his wife, how well they get along, and so on. I ended up fleeing to the next compartment and sat there until they got off the train the following day—only then did I calm down.”

In late 2023, 33-year-old Margarita from Moscow was rushing to visit family living in one of the regions. She recalls there being one last spot in one of the compartments. Boarding the train right before departure, the woman saw two travel companions: a drunk man in military uniform and another in civilian clothes.

“I sit down, they check my papers, I open my laptop, and this ‘Z-guy’ [“Z” is the symbol used by the Russian military in Ukraine] starts pestering me: ‘What’s your name? Let’s get acquainted. Where are you going?’ and all that. I tell him, ‘Excuse me, I don’t want to talk right now; let’s end this conversation; I’m busy.’ But that only egged him on: ‘Come on, what’s the big deal?’. He repeated the phrase ‘Can’t you just say what your name is?’ about 12 times, I think.”

Angered, Margarita sought out the conductor, who summoned the train chief. At first, they suggested moving the troublemaker to another compartment, but the young woman objected: “If he comes to me at night, what do you think I should do then?” Later, Margarita was informed that the soldier—by that point “totally wasted”—was removed from the train.

However, the kicked-off troublemaker’s travel companion was clearly irritated, she continues. “‘I’m trying to relax here, and you’re click-clacking on your keys; cut it out’,” she quotes him. “I went to the train chief again, saying, ‘Move me; I don’t feel safe; I’m uncomfortable; this is totally abnormal.’ And they did resettle me; I ended up riding in an empty compartment; I locked myself in, barricaded the door, and slept like a baby.”

Conflicts with drunk soldiers occur not only on trains but on planes as well. About six months ago, 28-year-old Olga was flying from Moscow to Novosibirsk with Yakutia airline. She took a window seat in the front rows.

“I often sit by the windows,” she recounts. “But when I boarded the plane, I saw that in the middle seat next to mine sat a large, middle-aged man in military uniform, and he was so big that he spilt over a bit to the left and right [onto the neighbouring seats]. To his left, closer to the aisle, sat an elderly woman. The soldier himself was in a half-asleep state. He was blind drunk, I’d say, totally sloshed.”

Olga squeezed into her seat and put on her headphones, noticing a “Mowing Down Dill” patch on the soldier’s uniform. After takeoff, her seatmate alternated between dozing off and “perking up, as much as his condition allowed,” she recalls. At one point, the man put his hand on the young woman’s thigh—Olga was wearing shorts.

“I tell him, ‘You shouldn’t do that’, to which he replied something like, ‘It’s just friendly’,” she remembers with disgust. “I say to him, ‘You can ‘just friendly’ touch your ‘own’ woman like that.’ And he goes: Well, I have a wife; I haven’t seen her for so-and-so long. I remember, he told me, ‘I want a woman.’ I say, ’And what do I have to do with that?’ ”

Olga recalls the seatmate “reeked so strongly of booze” that she was surprised they even let him on board. The soldier continued drinking during the flight, occasionally swigging from “either a flask or a pocket bottle." He mostly communicated with her in grunts and interjections; Olga remembers: “’Huh? Wha? Eh?’ And he’s this huge lummox—I’m tall myself, but he’s like a real wardrobe.”

From the man’s fragmented phrases, Olga gathered that he was coming from the war in Ukraine. Growing increasingly drunker, the troublemaker yelled for the whole cabin to hear: “I’m a defender!” she recalls.

“And so he fell asleep again, woke up, knocked back his pocket bottle, and started telling me what great guys they [Russian soldiers] are, how they’re defending the motherland, and so on,” Olga says. “Something ranting. The granny to his left tried to calm him down, saying, ‘Sonny, let’s keep it down; you are drinking, to boot!’. And I, to annoy him, purposefully started saying ‘sho’ [mimicking a Ukrainian accent]. And he’s like, ‘Why are you sho-ing? Are you a Khokhol girl?’”

Olga informed her seatmate that she had lived in Ukraine for some time, had many friends there, and did not support the invasion, but he “didn’t react much to that”. “He just went on: ‘So many of our young guys are dying’,” she recalls. “To which I reminded him that they’re not dying on their own territory; they came to someone else’s country. He says: ‘You don’t understand anything; my son died there!’ And I: ‘Well, very sorry, of course, but no one forced him to go there’.”

At one point, a passing flight attendant offered to reseat Olga, but she refused: “I answer him: ‘Listen, why should I move? He’s the one behaving inappropriately?’. And the flight attendant rolls his eyes, saying: ‘We’ve already had about seven like him this week.’ So, I gather this is a frequent occurrence for them.”

Soon the drunk soldier touched the woman’s leg again, after which she “smacked him upside the head,” and in response, “fists came flying at her,” Olga recalls. Chuckling nervously, she describes it as a “physical scuffle”: due to his drunkenness and size, the soldier couldn’t fully swing and harm her.

“But if he weren’t so confined, of course, he would’ve hit me, and I would’ve gone flying,” she admits. “And then the flight attendant couldn’t take it anymore and reseated me. For some reason, I felt so hurt and upset... After all, we were sitting at the very front of the plane; everyone in the cabin saw our altercation, including men, and no one said anything!”

“Shell-Shocked, Drinking Like Devils." Conductors on Why One “Should Be Careful” With Soldiers

In February 2024, a soldier who was supposed to fly from Moscow to Barnaul, Altai Krai, was removed from a Pobeda airline plane. According to the flight attendants, even before takeoff, the man smoked in the plane’s toilet and flushed the cigarette butt down the toilet. A report about the incident was published by the Katun 24 TV channel.

“Why are you kicking me off, damn it?” the soldier Dmitry, indignant, says in the footage shot on the plane. “I’m going home after being wounded; I didn’t smoke on your plane!”

According to eyewitnesses quoted by the report’s authors, Dmitry’s clothes were “literally soaked in tobacco,” and his seatmates felt the pungent cigarette odour coming from him back in the bus that took passengers to the plane. The soldier himself claimed he smoked right by the boarding ramp, but despite this, the crew commander called the police, and the soldier was removed.

Also in February, passengers on an S7 Airlines flight from Moscow to Yakutsk “stood up for a serviceman,” whom crew members asked to leave the aircraft, according to the SakhaNews publication. Readovka, a pro-government Telegram channel, reported that “a man in a slight state of intoxication caused discontent among the stewards,” after which “a verbal conflict arose, during which the flight attendants decided not to show diplomacy but simply called the police.” The passengers, however, displayed “the will of the people” and stood up for the drunk soldier, the message states.

“Leave the hero alone!” one of the female passengers demands in a video from the plane’s cabin, also published by the Telegram channel.

Employees of Pobeda airline were not given any additional instructions, “neither officially nor informally,” about potential conflict situations on board with “participants of the ‘special military operation’,” a flight attendant who requested anonymity told Mediazona.

“Colleagues from other airlines I’m close with also didn’t report anything of the sort,” she adds. “According to aviation security rules, the crew has the right to decide not to allow a person in a state of intoxication on board. The assessment is conducted visually by the crew. These measures are necessary to prevent possible incidents on board during the flight.”

Management and instructors at Russian Railways, the state-owned railway company, also ask employees to behave in a standard manner during conflicts with soldiers, says conductor Elena, who works on southern routes for one of the company’s subsidiaries.

“No special recommendations were given; everything is standard: don’t play hero, don’t poke the bear, report the situation to the train chief, lock yourself [in the compartment] if things get really serious,” she states. “You can partially turn a blind eye to things like smoking, which is prohibited because you can’t do anything about it anyway, and an open conflict will arise. Well, that’s what they say. Physically intervening is clearly not allowed by the rules. We’re always advised to smooth over conflicts in general. And with soldiers, one should be more careful overall.”

By law, troublemakers should be removed by the transport police, but they are “a great rarity” and “practically never” accompany trains, says 24-year-old Kira, who recently worked for the Federal Passenger Company, another subsidiary of Russian Railways.

“If there’s a troublemaker on the train, the police are called to the nearest station—but only if there’s cell service. And if the passenger is clearly not drunk, then to remove them, you need signatures from other passengers—only then can the person be taken off the train. But people are afraid here.”

Sometimes, the Ministry of Defence rents out separate train cars for soldiers, and conductors work in them for extra pay, she continues. Once, the young woman spent about a month handling the rental of such cars, concluding contracts with representatives of the Ministry of Defence.

“They’d leave a request: we need so many cars for such-and-such period,” Kira explains. “Sometimes without conductor accompaniment, sometimes with. And occasionally, conductors would leave with these cars on months-long business trips. It’s called ‘military transport’—there’s extra pay for it. And many even like working on military transport because when soldiers travel as a unit, for example, with a commander, they most often behave decently. They might even clean up after themselves.”

But in passenger trains, the main problem is servicemen who, alone or in small groups, are returning from the war, the young woman confirms: “Shell-shocked, lost their marbles, drinking like devils—and, accordingly, often scaring other passengers too.”

Kira says that while working at FPC, she had access to a database of passenger complaints, and out of curiosity, she often read stories about the inappropriate behaviour of “special military operation participants” en route.

“Absolutely all complaints from various communication channels end up there: hotline, unified help centre—all that accumulated there,” she explains. “The things in there! They [the soldiers] broke toilets; there was, for example, one complaint about them completely ripping out a toilet in a carriage. They behaved inappropriately, aggressively; someone was hallucinating; they threatened other passengers.”

Mostly, people complained that rowdy soldiers were not removed from the train. “And if someone was removed, then the special operation participants themselves would file complaints about being ‘unlawfully’ kicked out,” the young woman chuckles nervously. “In such cases, an internal investigation was conducted, recorders were pulled—and then it would turn out they were removed very much lawfully. Because they behaved like total scum.”

“They Say They’re Going to Die Anyway.” How Conductors Are Advised to Settle Conflicts With Soldiers

“In 2022–23, I coordinated the work of, let’s say, novice conductors at FPC,” Kira continues. “On southern routes, my charges often faced a sense of impunity from the soldiers. The main southern destinations are Anapa, Kislovodsk, Novorossiysk, Sukhum, and Yeysk. There’s also Grand Service Express—that’s no longer FPC, it’s a separate Russian Railways subsidiary, and they run trains to Crimea, to Yevpatoria, and Sevastopol. For them, such [incidents with soldiers] are at every turn.”

In 2023, a conductor on a route was threatened by a “special operation participant” after the young man stood up for a female passenger in the carriage, the Mediazona interviewee recalls.

“He [the soldier] first walked through the carriages looking for women, after which he started harassing one girl. And then, when the conductor stood up for this girl, he began threatening him too. The conductor went to the train chief; they had cops travelling with them then, but this special operation participant wasn’t removed, even though he should’ve been. The train chief then asked to ‘not blow the conflict out of proportion’ and that they’d settle everything quietly themselves. The passenger was terrified; she was very scared. And the conductor himself was frightened.”

On Russian trains, only the “obviously drunk” are prohibited from travelling; others are given a pass, she admits. “On long-distance trains, a lot of people sip beer they buy at stations. And if a person behaves quietly, the conductors try not to pay attention to them if there are no complaints from other passengers. Because there’s absolutely no way to deal with all these people.”

Often, other passengers prefer not to get involved with heavily intoxicated soldiers, and some even ask conductors to let them ride to their stop despite their inappropriate behaviour, conductor Elena says.

“You tell the passengers: Let’s remove him, sign the report, we need two passports, then it’ll be too late, all the stops are short, we have to ride through the night. But they ‘feel sorry’! Well, what can I do—they have to travel with them,” she sighs.

According to Elena, in her experience, there were cases when enraged soldiers, “so they wouldn’t attack anyone,” had to be tied up with bedsheets. Most often, fights happen near the dining car, where soldiers with “faces yellow from drinking binges” sit for hours.

“They were hallucinating, or I don’t know what. Some trauma or fear manifests in them that they’re going back to the front. That’s why they drink, because they’re scared, but they can’t talk normally about this feeling. As a result, we get a drunk nutjob who, who knows what he has in his pocket.”

Elena recalls broken glass in the vestibules, death threats, and “real torment” of female conductors due to their ethnicity or excess weight.

“We service southern routes; we have a young crew,” she sighs. “The girls are often subjected to blatantly indecent propositions. Some try to corner them, give compliments, stroke their legs, and we can only work in skirts; that’s the uniform... Smoking is a total nightmare. My most hated phrase is: ‘Miss, you’re so beautiful.’ That means they’ll now be begging to let them smoke. At some point, you stop chasing them off, despite the stench; you just don’t have any strength left.”

Moreover, rowdy “special operation participants” often declare that only the military commandant’s office can order them around and openly talk about their impunity, the conductor says: “They appeal to the fact that they’re going to die soon anyway, and that they’re actually defending us: ‘You’re heartless and ungrateful’.”

Editor: Maria Klimova