A war like no other: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a war on gender order

ABSTRACT

Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine represents a critical juncture for the role gender plays in European security. We argue that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not only gendered in the way other conflict are, but the war's essential novelty lies in the fact that it is explicitly fought for the so-called traditional values, against gender and sexual equalities. Drawing on local decolonial insights and theoretical concepts of liberal/illiberal gender orders, we contrast the Russian neo-traditionalism with the Ukrainian account of the Russian invasion, while seeking to uncover how an imagination of Europe is constitutive for these gendered discourses. We show that the construction of the narratives is a circular process of ever more pronounced neo-traditionalism by Russia which sees Europe as its decadent Other. We demonstrate that these discourses have real consequences as the Russian illiberal gender order justifies and wages real war against Ukraine and gender is turning into the central battlefield both in the figurative and the literal sense of the word. Russian accounts contrast with Ukraine's hybridised, but increasingly emancipatory discourses and practices which have been playing a fundamental role in Ukraine's resistance to the Russian invasion.

KEYWORDS:

• Ukraine
• European security
• gendered war
• Russian imperialism
• gender order
• traditional values

Introduction

A Ukrainian mother-warrior with her face covered with soot is saving a child from the ruins of a city burned by Russian shelling. This is the central narrative of the song “Mother Stefania” by the Ukrainian Kalush Orchestra (2022), which won the 2022 Eurovision contest. What is striking about the song and its music video is not only that it was filmed in Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka, and Hostomel, all towns which suffered the horrors of the Russian genocidal invasion of Ukraine,¹ but also that the song connects war and femininity in highly innovative ways. While the song’s lyrics as well as the accompanying video play on the traditional war tropes of women as mothers, the main storyline revolves around Ukraine’s female soldiers. In the video, women do not serve as mere background for the heroic actions of the male soldiers. Instead, the song shows Ukrainian women as brave fighters and active defenders of their motherland.

This radical re-casting of women’s role in war can be contrasted with the re-emergence of hypermasculinity in the Russian discourses about the war. Here, distinct gender roles are naturalised and viewed as strictly divided from each other, with women mentioned as heroes only in relation to the number of children they gave birth to. War remains the domain of men and women either become passive victims or they are entirely “switched off” to be “switched on” only at the end of the war so that they can mourn the fallen soldiers, as one Russian feminist put it (Net voyne 2022). But even this seemingly traditional account is in fact a pseudo-traditional construction that creates the image of an inescapable conflict between Europe, the West (and the “puppet regime” in Ukraine) on one side and Russia as the global defender of the natural gender identities on the other.

Using feminist theorising of gender orders and anti-gender politics, we contrast the Russian neo-traditionalism with the Ukrainian account of the Russian invasion, while seeking to uncover how an imagination of Europe is constitutive for these gendered discourses. It is our first argument that the two – Ukrainian and Russian – discourses on gender, sexualities, and war (a) make sense against the backdrop of Europe and its hegemonic discourses on gender and (b) are mutually constitutive, feeding into each other and strengthening their divergences. We show that the construction of the elite narratives can be seen as a circular process of an ever-increasing presence of emancipatory elements in Ukraine and the ever more pronounced neo-traditionalist reaction in Russia. In this process, Europe is increasingly imagined by Ukraine as a liberal place opposed to the “illiberal East” (Shirinian 2021), while Europe is imagined as “perverse” by Russia (Romanets 2017). Secondly, we demonstrate that these discourses have real consequences as the Russian illiberal gender order justifies and wages real gendered war on Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine thus becomes a contestation of gender order with gender turning into the central battlefield both in the figurative and the literal sense of the word.

The article proceeds in four steps. First, we present our theoretical approach by outlining the complex European and Russian coloniality that is attached to the gendered discourses through opposing visions of gender orders and gendered imaginations about war. Here, we also clarify our methodology. Second, we shed light on the construction of Russian neo-traditionalism, the centrality of the illiberal gender order in this construction against the Other, i.e. Europe and the ways gender remains central in all phases of the invasion, ranging from its justification to the physical violence on the ground. Third, we analyse the hybridised, but increasingly emancipatory discourses and practices within the Ukrainian struggle against the invasion, showing how essential the redefinition of gender roles is for the country’s resistance and its European path. Finally, we present our conclusions, including the implications for the EU’s policies.

Gender orders and gendered war

This inquiry into the gendered discourses of the Russian war against Ukraine engages with theoretical concepts of liberal/illiberal gender orders and anti-gender politics (Edenborg 2017, Korolczuk and Graff 2018, Shevtsova 2023). We primarily build on and wish to speak to local decolonial scholarship whose international recognition is long overdue (see Tlostanova 2012, Sonevytsky 2019, Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2021, Kassymbekova 2023, Shevtsova 2023). The local feminist studies of the imperial contestation and of the legacy of Russian imperialism and colonialism have been long unfairly ignored in the Western academia, which has, simultaneously, dominated knowledge production (Kulawik 2020, Graff 2022, Tsymbalyuk 2022, Kassymbekova 2023). The local decolonial insights of those “living through war and oppression” (Tsymbalyuk 2022; see also Parashar 2013) are crucial for understanding Russian imperialism and Ukraine’s narrative constructions of emancipatory mobilisation against the imperial oppressor.

The article puts forward the central claim that Ukraine is a country geographically and culturally posited as a zone between “two rival imperial centres” (Sonevytsky 2019 cited in Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2021). The first of these centres is the Russian/Soviet Empire, which sees Ukraine as its eternal province, “Little Russia” (Sonevytsky 2019, 27). Russia chose to build its own variant of modernity by proving it can “out-west” the West and reject everything European (Tlostanova 2012, 135). In this context, Ukraine is seen as the key litmus test for the success of the Russian project of alternative modernity: Given the cultural and historical significance of Ukraine for Russia, the Russian imperial imagination expects that the model must be adopted by Ukraine as well. If it is not, it is hard to imagine that it would be acceptable for culturally more distant countries and the entire project would fail.

The second centre is the European/Western hegemony which has generated Russia’s complex of a secondary European (Tlostanova 2012, Morozov 2015) but which also positions Ukraine as a European periphery (Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2021, 125). The West, represented by the EU, sees itself as offering a combination of cultural and socio-economic advancements that can metaphorically move Ukraine from the putative post-communist malaise into the world of liberal modernity. At the same time, “returning” to Europe cannot be seen outside of the hierarchical imperial projects of European empires that continue to regulate the racialised borders of Europe (Suchland 2021 see also Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik 2021). This offer, despite its many problems, does contain emancipatory (albeit increasingly contested) elements of a liberal gender order that supports sexual and gender equalities (e.g. Kunz and Maisenbacher 2017, Shevtsova 2023).

Russia, on the other hand, has countered the growing influence of Western ideas in and around Russia through its alternative vision of an illiberal traditional gender order especially in the past fifteen years (Riabov and Riabova 2014, Edenborg 2017). To shed more light on this self-understanding of Russia, we borrow the concept of “illiberal East” which represents the self-orientalising Eastern civilisation that draws out its own boundaries not through backwardness but radical difference from the West (Shirinian 2021, 961). As this alternative vision has little to offer in terms of economic development, it relies heavily on the process of cultural and political Othering from the EU (and the West) with a particular focus on what has been referred to as Russia’s re-masculinisation (Riabov and Riabova 2014) or Russian hegemonic masculinity in relation to subordinated femininity and non-hegemonic masculinities of its adversaries (Romanets 2017, 160). In line with that, Ukraine is posited by Russia as feminised and torn between a masculine Russia defending traditional values, and a sexually degenerate Europe, referred to as “Gayropa” (Edenborg 2017, 159, see also Suchland 2018).

Two caveats need to be added to these arguments. First, the Russian seemingly traditional account is in fact a relatively novel pseudo-traditional invention (Rivkin-Fish 2010, cf. also Ozhiganova 2019). Hence, the discursive and military contestation is not one between the old and natural, and the new and artificial, but between two relatively recent constructions of gender identities manifested through liberal and illiberal gender orders. The second caveat pertains to Ukrainian agency in the competition between the two orders. The Russian narrative entirely ignores Ukraine’s intentionality and its ability to act on its own: Ukraine has been simply manipulated by the West and, as a result, it has become an object of the contestation between the two imperial centres. The idea that Ukrainians themselves might willingly choose one alternative over the other is entirely absent from the Russian discourse. Our paper can be seen as an attempt to critique this silence. While doing so, we build on locally engaged accounts on/from Ukraine which show that women can, under certain circumstances, utilise war resistance for their own empowerment (Khromeychuk 2018, Barth 2021, Phillips and Martsenyuk 2023). Again, this attention to the Ukrainian agency and discourses is important for a second reason too as feminist voices from the post-socialist region and from Ukraine have so far been epistemically marginalised in the Western-dominated feminist peace and security research (Stavrevska et al. 2022, 34, Krulišová and O’Sullivan 2022). Western scholarship still remains centred on Russia (e.g. Eichler 2012, Edenborg 2017, Gentry 2018, Wilkinson 2018).

Feminist scholars have thus far shown that dichotomous constructions not only continue to underpin the gendered structures of states that privilege masculinity over femininity, but they also play a crucial role in the constitution of state identities, military security, and, most importantly, in the legitimisation of war (Stachowitsch 2013, Wibben ed. 2016, True 2018). Scholarship specifically on/from the region of Eastern Europe and Central Asia reveals that the recent wars conducted by Russia rely on state identity based on militarised patriotism (Eichler 2012, cf. also Kratochvíl and Shakhanova 2021), on Russia’s legitimacy as a masculine state actor and the illegitimacy of the femininised enemy combatants in Chechnya (see Gentry 2018). This approach is applied more broadly across the post-Soviet space – see for instance Koch’s (2011) account on the gendered saviour narrative of protector/protected in the case of the justification of state violence by Karimov’s regime in Uzbekistan.

While drawing on this feminist literature, we show that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is deeply gendered in the way other conflicts are - via the underlying gendered dichotomies, militarised patriarchal structures, sexualised violence and embodied everyday insecurities (e.g. Cohn 2013, Wibben 2016). But as Cohn (2013, 2) reminds us, wars are not uniformly gendered phenomena and the concrete role gendered relations play varies from one violent conflict to another. We argue that the essential novelty of Russia's war against Ukraine lies in the fact that it is explicitly fought for the so-called traditional values, the meaning of gender, sexuality, womanhood and manhood, and what the “natural” place for women is, both in the war and in peace time. In other words, the war is not only implicitly gendered, but gender becomes a central point of explicit contestation.

Methodologically, we draw on feminist critical discourse analysis (CDA), which can reveal the operation and construction of gendered binaries as well as the related power asymmetries (Gentry 2018, 35). To do so, this paper explores the war narrative and visual representations in Russia and Ukraine during the first six months of the full-scale invasion in two areas: the leading political representatives of both countries, and the feminist segments of civil society and the media. Our textual corpus thus consists of:

1. the key pronouncements by the political leaders of Ukraine and Russia (presidents, foreign ministers, etc.) – altogether 25 textual units (11 Ukrainian, 14 Russian texts).

2. the discourses of the (independent) media, civil society, and NGOs, especially the feminist ones from Ukraine and Russia – altogether 27 textual units (11 Ukrainian, 16 Russian texts). While we always used the original language versions of the texts, often the original text was in English in the case of Ukraine, which has actively addressed an international audience at all levels in order to gain its support against Russian imperial aggression.

This article makes several original contributions. Firstly, our research contributes to the transnational feminist knowledge flow from the post-socialist region. This region, posited in-between Global North and South, is often epistemically invisible in feminist security scholarship (Krulišová and O’Sullivan 2022). We believe that this exchange is crucial for avoiding the many misunderstandings in the West about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Secondly, we enrich the theoretical concepts of gender orders and anti-gender politics by showing that an illiberal gender order can produce a real gendered war and genocidal violence and become a central point of contestation. Thirdly, we empirically contribute to feminist security knowledge on/from the region with our findings on Ukraine by showing that war resistance against the imposition of an illiberal gender order can produce emancipatory development towards a fairer European gender order.

The war and the construction of neo-traditionalism in Russia

In the Russian discourse, the connection between the illiberal gender order and the war is present on multiple levels. It ranges from the justification of the war to the strict roles assigned in the war’s execution, including the gendered violence on the ground. Two dimensions stand out, however. First, the Russian narrative about the war is not only based on the juxtaposition of the Russian hypermasculinity and the decadent, feminine West, but this hypermasculinity is built on a series of discursive silences and suppressions. The degeneracy of Europe is so abhorrent that it does not deserve to be explicitly mentioned. Instead, as we will show below, Russia’s male leaders only hint and insinuate, focusing on producing well-orchestrated imagery of the “natural” male-female relations. Second, the official Russian narrative is elaborately structured, with different public figures focusing on different aspects of the “natural gender order”. The key public figures typically address only one topic which ridicules sexualities and gender identities: for instance, the speaker of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) focuses almost entirely on transgender issues, others speak about gays and lesbians, etc. But taken together, these narratives create a compact picture of the Russian fight for a normal (illiberal) world which is endangered by European (and Western) sexual and gender permissiveness and perversion.

Political discourses: a gendered war on western degeneracy

It was, paradoxically, not President Putin, but Patriarch Kirill who made the connection between the Russian involvement in Ukraine and the Western destruction of the traditional moral order most explicit. The “attempts to destroy the Donbas in the last eight years”, the Patriarch argued on 6 March 2022, are closely related to “the so-called values” (Tsargrad 2022a) of those who want to dominate the world. As the Patriarch argued, these imposed values are then tested by gay parades, which people in the Donbas do not accept. The war thus transforms from a conflict of Russia and Ukraine into the Russian struggle against the global imposition of immorality. As accepting gay rights would mean “the end of human civilization” (Tsargrad 2022a), Russia does not fight a simple conventional enemy, but a metaphysical foe.

President Putin, while following a similar discursive line, almost never speaks about LGBT + people, nor does he use arguments based on explicit references to gender. Instead, Putin replaces these concrete references with general claims about the overall “degradation and degeneracy” (Bloomberg 2022) and even “Satanism” (Rettman 2022) of the West. As the President claimed in his Victory Day speech, it is the West who decided to “cancel the millennia-old values” (Victory Parade 2022), thus falling prey to “moral degradation” and Russophobia (Victory Parade 2022). Whether these words apply to gay marriage, transgender issues or the emancipation of women is not spelt out in either of the key speeches. This omission seems to be deliberate. President Putin is constructing an image of an uncontested gender order and common-sensical traditional values. By discursively omitting even to mention gay or transgender people, these “deviations” are not even deemed worthy of being discussed and the unchallenged status of the heteronormative, patriarchal order is thus reaffirmed.²

Interestingly, the strategy of discursive silencings and replacements (that pertain to the word “war” itself) are also applied to women and their role in the war. Although the threat to the natural gender order is frequently invoked as the cause of the conflict, women are almost entirely absent from the discourse. The war is fought over women and their role in society, but it is not fought by women in the President’s narrative. The enemies are men (nationalists and neo-Nazis, always referred to in masculine form, which the Russian language strictly distinguishes, Bloomberg 2022), and those fighting for Russia are men as well. Women appear in two contexts only. The first is the rare references to women in Russia’s history. The existence of the women’s battalions during the Second World War were briefly mentioned (Vstrecha 2022), but no parallel was made to female soldiers today. The second type of reference to women in history consists of mentioning Empress Catherine the Great, Putin’s favourite historical figure, who conquered the territories of what is today southern Ukraine. Otherwise, women are relegated to the traditional position of those in need of protection. The President often mentions “the elderly, the women and the children of Donbas” (Kremlin 2022a). A deceased (male) soldier is commended by the President as a war hero for literally shielding with his body “women (and) children” (Kremlin 2022b), and when celebrating the Day of the Border Guard (pogranichnik, a term used exclusively as a masculine noun in Russian), it is again guardsmen who help “women, children, and the elderly” (Victory Parade 2022).

The illiberal gender order, in combination with militarised patriotism, is imposed on the relations between the Russian people and the country as well. The soldiers are always addressed in the masculine form, while their country is always referred to by a feminine or neuter noun (“rodina”, “otechestvo”) (Bloomberg 2022). Discursively central is the notion of muzhestvo, “courage” (but literally “manhood”), that is often invoked in connection with the war (Kremlin 2022a, Victory Parade 2022). This “manly” root of courage then also makes it possible to argue that the Western moral decadence leads to “the erasure of the courage” (threatening, at the same time, with “the erasure of the manhood”) of the Russian soldiers of the past (Victory Parade 2022). The recognised heroism of women, on the other hand, is of a different type: it is related to the number of children they gave birth to (Putin 2022) or to those women who adopt Donbas orphans whose parents were killed by the Ukrainian neo-Nazis (Putin 2022).

While President Putin thus speaks very little about the role of women in the war effort and even less about LGBT + people, the patriarchal hierarchies related to the war are often evident from the neatly arranged public imagery. A typical example was the meeting of President Putin with flight attendants. The flight attendants, all female and young, created a tableau typical for Putin’s image of a masculine leader explaining the war to Russian women (see Vstrecha 2022). First, the flight attendants asked questions about the war in Ukraine without mentioning “war” (speaking about the “current events”, etc.), and then they asked the President several questions related to their “natural” female roles (such as those of providing social security or family support) only to confirm that they stand behind the leader in his actions. The distinction between the manly, rational President and the soft, emotional flight attendants is then confirmed by the attendants themselves. One of them, speaking for the entire gathering, said that “rationally we understand and entirely support your actions, but our womanly hearts are concerned” (Vstrecha 2022).

This clearly structured imagery related to war and gender is then reproduced on other levels as well. For Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov women appear exclusively as victims; otherwise, they are never mentioned. It is “very bad” that soldiers are dying in the war, but what is even worse is that “civilians, women, [and] children” are dying as well (Regnum 2022). Similarly, in the mass graves allegedly discovered in Donbas, most of the victims were, according to the Minister, “women and elderly people” (Russian Federation 2022). As far as the “deviations” from the accepted gender norms are concerned, Minister Lavrov replicates President Putin’s strategy of silencing - such topics are not worth addressing and they are relegated to the lower levels.

The lower levels of the Foreign Ministry’s bureaucracy, however, do address these issues quite vigorously. In particular, the speaker of the Ministry Maria Zakharova made gender and especially transgender people a central element of her critique of the West. Interestingly, Zakharova entirely focussed on the allegedly confused gender order of the West. When directly asked about the dearest values of Russia, she claimed that “we do not accept a neutral gender for human beings” as “we call our sons and daughters boys and girls” (Tsargrad 2022b). In a similar vein, when addressing the possible candidacy of Boris Johnson for the position of NATO General Secretary, Zakharova mockingly suggested that he should “discover a woman in himself” or choose from the “number of genders accepted in NATO countries” (Zakharova 2022). Zakharova also often engaged in ridiculing the insufficient manliness of the Ukrainian President Zelensky, arguing, for instance, that he needed his wife to make him less boring. (TASS 2022) All in all, Zakharova claimed that gender rights are superfluous and said, “thank goodness, the women in Russia do not understand what this fight for these rights is about” (E1.ru 2022).

This strict division of gender norms pertains not only to the justification of the war and the framing of women as victims. It is also strongly present in the public presentations of the Russian army, both in the “special military operation” in Ukraine and in Russia. During the widely watched Victory Day Parade at the Red Square in Moscow, the vast majority of the official audience as well as the soldiers marching by were male. The marching female members of the armed forces were clearly marked: they wore short white skirts and interestingly, while the men all wore very serious expressions, the marching women were smiling broadly to stress their femininity (see Victory Parade 2022). Even in the few mixed battalions, women had to be marked as different by wearing big laced ribbons in their hair. The (male) voice accompanying the parade went to great length to explain that the main roles of these women would not be related to fighting, but that they would serve as “the future specialists of the rear and communications, psychologists and interpreters, legal and financial experts” (Parad Pobedy 2022).

The main narrative in the mainstream media follows the same pattern of the victimisation of women (TVZvezda 2022, 1tv.ru 2022a). However, the narrative is enriched by the argument that women lost their femininity in Ukraine, and only by arriving in Russia can they regain it. One report, for instance, interviewed some female refugees who were offered a visit to a hairdresser, which was organised and covered by Russian authorities, so that they “[could] feel like women again” and “be beautiful and unique” (1tv.ru 2022b). Another news report made a similar argument about pregnant refugees who “were afraid to give birth in the cellars” and who could finally bear their children after safely arriving in Russia (1tv.ru 2022c), as if they would regain their femininity through motherhood only after fleeing the alleged Ukrainian bombardments. Needless to say, no mentions were made of the Russian attacks against civilian targets in Ukraine, such as maternity hospitals.

Civil society discourse: a radical opposition to the invasion

The discourses of the Russian feminist movements, which are typically made public on social media or in the independent Russian media outlets abroad, are entirely different. This difference lies not only in the way women and gender issues are discussed, but also in terms of the vocabulary used (they consistently speak about “war” or “the war of occupation”) (Manifesto 2022a). Also, instead of positing women in the background as listeners of the leading male figure, Russian feminist authors make sure that female voices are consistently directly present as authors of studies, feminist activists or female soldiers and refugees. This also means that the accompanying visual imagery differs greatly from the official visualisations (see e.g. Chesova 2022).

However, while the basic feminist narrative is in fact similar to the official one in that it also argues that the war is a clash of values, the Manifesto of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance claims that it is Russia which has set itself a “missionary” task of bringing its “traditional values” to Ukraine, while “using violence against those who do not agree” (Manifesto 2022a). The Manifesto also highlights the link between these values and “the exploitation of women”, both within the Russian authoritarian patriarchy and in the war against Ukraine. If the official narrative claims that Russia, by means of the special military operation, is returning femininity to Ukrainian women, the feminists argue that Russia is imposing on Ukraine a kind of subservient femininity that is firmly embedded in the Russian patriarchal structures.

In many of the feminist texts we studied, a clear link is established between Russian patriarchy and the war as well as between the patriarchy and the level of brutality in the conduct of the war (Fanaylova and Merkurieva 2022). A reverse impact of the war on the life of women in Russia is also observed: as war is the “normalization of violence”, more violence against women will likely follow in Russia as well, with the war threatening to destroy the past achievements of Russian feminists (Fanaylova and Merkurieva 2022). Feminists also directly address the discursive silences surrounding the roles of women in the war. For instance, in a widely shared video titled “No to War: An Address to Women” its author points out that even though wars are started and finished by men, “when men are fighting, we do not disappear, we are not put on hold and then appear again when the war is over and we need to weep over the corpses” (Net voyne 2022). The same argument is made in the bottom line of a story run by the opposition outlet Meduza, which claims that even though “we got used to thinking that war does not have a female face [ … ], women are not only the victims of war, but also participants [in it]” (Chesova 2022).

Finally, the topics that the feminist texts address also starkly distinguish them from the official ones. Feminists document the personal stories of women who were bullied and harassed by policemen after protesting against the war (Manifest 2022b), they report the sexual exploitation of female Ukrainian refugees in Russia (Kondrashova 2022) and they interview female soldiers who were abused after being captured by Russian soldiers (Pinchuk 2022). But they also report on the cases where Russian conscientious objectors were forced to become soldiers in the war, or on how “effeminate” men are seen by authorities as a challenge to the Fatherland and sent to be “corrected” by serving in the army (Svetlova 2022).

To sum up, the Russian discourses on the war can be divided into two starkly opposed positions, that of the political leadership and that of the independent civil society. However, these two discursive clusters are not of the same size, visibility, or influence. The Russian leadership has succeeded in creating a totalising dominant narrative that skilfully combines the pronouncements of the President with the more sharply expressed views of other political figures. This narrative is then intensely supported by the media as well as by the pseudo-civil-society actors. As much as the “non-systemic” opposition and (feminist) civil society try to challenge this narrative, their influence remains doubtful, and their audience remains limited to segments of the younger liberal urban population.

Ukraine’s gender revolutions

The Ukrainian accounts of the war are vastly different; they reveal a hybrid but ever-increasing presence of emancipatory gender norms, against the illiberal ones represented by the invader. The emergence of these accounts is part of a long-term trend that is (partially) related to the process of Europenisation via the Association Agreement with the EU which required adoption of sexual and gender equalities (see Shevtsova 2023). This emancipatory trend started, according to Ukrainian feminists, with the desire for a European Ukraine at the Maidan Revolution of Dignity or Values in 2014. Olesya Khromeychuk recalls that Maidan was harnessed by women for making a “[r]evolution within a revolution” (2018, 51, see also Onuch and Martsenyuk 2014). Tamara Martsenyuk stresses that women were not just “helpers” but “makers” of the revolution which has enabled them to challenge the traditional gender roles (2015, 73). However, the subsequent conflict after the annexation of Crimea by Russia has cast doubts over these developments, having far reaching gendered consequences. Women became not just the majority of the internally displaced, but their livelihoods were also disproportionally affected by the austerity policies that followed (Dutchak 2018, Mathers 2020, O’Sullivan 2020, Lyubchenko 2022). While this was accompanied by a high increase in gender-based violence (GBV), including conflict-related sexual violence (DCAF and La Strada-Ukraine 2017), neither of these have been systematically addressed.

This closely relates to the challenges that came with the discursive contestation over gender following the Russian neo-traditionalist turn and an active imposition of the new gender order based on illiberal values in the region, including in Ukraine (see Suslova 2017, Shevtsova 2023). Russia’s anti-gender campaign, together with the strong role of churches in Ukraine, and inactivity of the EU led to the rejection of the Istanbul Convention³ in 2017 (see Ketelaars 2019). This confirms the argument by Shevtsova about a “selective Europenization” (2023, 172), whereby religious leaders proposed adopting some European norms and rejecting others, such as LGBTQI rights. As a counterstrategy, Ukrainian feminist activists increasingly tried to “Ukrainize” their fight for women’s rights, depicting them as integral to Ukraine’s struggle for independence (Ketelaars 2019, 747).

In spite of these mounting problems, women and feminist activists were successful in achieving a number of changes. This includes a legislative amendment that opened up the Ukrainian army to women after a series of successful bottom-up demands driven by women’s decision to defend the nation (see Martsenyuk et al. 2016). Another example is the adoption and gradual, albeit still limited, localisation of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda (see Dudko and Langenhuizen 2022) from the initial focus on the security sector (see O’Sullivan 2019). We can conclude that overall, women’s emancipation was an important part of the rapid societal transformation after Maidan and these changes played a decisive role in women’s mobilisation to resist the full-scale invasion that followed.

Gender revolution through war resistance

The Russian invasion of 2022 has further strengthened both the emancipatory trend in Ukraine and the gendered insecurities there. While wars are typically seen as reinforcing militarised masculinities and deepening women’s subordination (see e.g. Cohn 2013), Ukraine’s self-defence against the Russian invasion has been producing a rather different emancipatory effect that entails a fundamental re-definition of masculinities and femininities. At the same time this “revolution through war resistance” is contested and the liberal gender order on which it is based remains fragile as it plays out against the background of the Russian genocidal aggression, which has compounded women‘s insecurities, with gendered impacts of an unimaginable scale.

A good representation of this idiosyncratic development are the discourses of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who embodies a male leadership strikingly different from the aggressive masculinity and authoritarian style of the Russian President. That this is a conscious decision is, for example, visible from the way the daily presidential addresses to the nation are formulated. Zelensky frequently appeals to Ukrainian men and women by using both masculine and feminine forms (“Ukrayintsi,” “Ukrayinky”) (Zelensky 2022a, 2022c). In other speeches, including his famous video message from 25 February 2022 that responds to Russia’s disinformation by saying “we are all here”, Zelensky glorifies both male and female defenders (slava nashym zakhysnykam, slava nashym zakhysnytsim) (Nexta 2022). These new discursive practices, which are used also by other government officials, have been hailed by Ukrainian feminists as a “huge recognition” that builds on the feminist work of the post-Maidan years (Feminist Perspectives on Russia’s War against Ukraine 2022). By recognising women’s agency in resistance, this new gender narrative creates the understanding of women as equal with men in the struggle for Ukraine’s existence.

Central to the changes in discourses and practices is also the representation of women in key governmental roles. In this regard, one could specifically mention the Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Olga Stefanishyna and the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk. They both accentuate women’s agencies in the war. Much consideration is given to women’s active armed as well as civilian resistance, which, again, contrasts with their near absence in the Russian discourse. In her Twitter posts, Stefanishyna (2022a) speaks of women’s equality in the military: “7 000 women have joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Shoulder to shoulder with men, they fight for our survival.” Stefanishyna (2022b) also praises women’s active role in the war and recognises the gradual emancipatory trend: “Current women's leadership in Ukraine rests on the fundamental steps done before in gender policy.” The positive references to “gender” again set the Ukrainian official discourse apart from the Russian one, where “gender” only appears as a derogatory term related to the West.

The effect of the greater stress on women’s subjectivity is nigh omnipresent. Even the discourse on gendered violence committed by Russian troops in Ukraine continues with the agential line rather than slipping into a victimising narrative. In her reference to Ukrainian women who were released from a Russian prison, Vereschuk (Piper 2022) said: “[t]hey want us to be scared. They want us to cry and to be victims. But we aren't.” Very intense is Vereshchuk’s (2022a) manifestation of the gendered aggression, as she announces the number of women included in prisoner exchanges or takes photos with women released from captivity, appreciating their courage and resilience under unthinkable circumstances of torture, rape, and humiliation by Russians. This image as well as many others also discursively serves as a reminder that Russia’s war is gendered not only on the level of political discourses or political appointments, but also on the level of gendered bodies. The historian Marta Havryshko (2022) notes that the shaved heads of the captive Ukrainian women represent an attack on the women’s bodily integrity because of the cultural importance attached to female hair. Indeed, this corresponds with Russia’s logic of depicting Ukrainian women as defeminised and as victims of the decadent, unnatural gender order.

The re-definition of femininity is thus inevitably shaped by the embodied experiences of resistance to the Russian invasion, which bring together gendered discourses, practices, and corporeality. This is, for instance, apparent in the novel construction of motherhood which combines traditional and emancipatory elements. In this construction, motherhood is not only compatible with armed resistance, but it has become closely intertwined with it (Chesova 2022) as we have demonstrated in our introductory comment on the “Mother Stefania” song. Having said this, the traditional aspects of motherhood continue to be often emphasised, even if in combination with a military experience. For instance, when the Ukrainian army medic Olga Semidyanova was killed by Russian troops in March, she was presented not only as a brave army medic serving since 2014, but also as a mother of 12 children with the mother-heroine status (MFA of Ukraine 2022).

Unlike in the Russian official discourse, however, the Ukrainian motherhood discourse goes beyond the private sphere and mother-son/children relations. Interestingly, when the Ukrainian leaders directly address the citizens of Russia, they revert to the traditional narrative focused on the mother at home and the son on the battlefield: “Now I turn to Russian mothers: Take your sons out of Ukraine! Dead or alive!” (Vereshchuk 2022b). In a similar way, Zelensky’s statement reflects that it is only Russian men and therefore “sons” that are dying in Ukraine: “Do the words “son”, “mother”, “father” mean nothing to you anymore?” (Zelensky, 20 March 2022). These appeals draw their strength from the attacks on targets that are traditionally associated with mothers, including maternity hospitals, kindergartens and schools. The aim of these appeals is thus to unmask Russia’s actual acts of gendered violence, which are in a striking contradiction to its narrative of saving Ukrainian women by returning their femininity to them.

The discursive gender change during the invasion has also been accompanied by a number of policy and societal changes towards gender equality order. An important step for respecting women’s rights was the prompt and smooth adoption of the Istanbul Convention by the Verkhovna Rada, which had previously rejected it. President Zelensky (21 June 2022) signed the Convention without delay, noting that its adoption “has been ‘undermined’ in Ukraine for decades. But its main content is simple – it is the obligation “to protect against violence and various forms of discrimination.” In his address to a European audience at the time of its ratification, Zelensky (2022b) linked the Convention with European values and democracy. Correspondingly, homophobic attitudes have been on the decline in Ukraine: a public opinion survey conducted in May 2022 shows that twice as many respondents as 6 years ago (64%) support the idea that residents of Ukraine who have a homosexual orientation should have the same rights as others (Martsenyuk 2022).

“Guns come after words:” resisting the gendered discourse and war

Compared to the government, the discursive space of feminist civil society is less hybridised but more revolutionary. This is manifested in the omnipresence of the terms “gender”, “feminist”, and LGBTQIA + in their vocabulary. Many local feminists emphasise the emancipatory social changes in Ukraine since Euromaidan and their connection to the Russian invasion. The philosopher Tamara Zlobina (Ukrainian Feminists’ Responses to the Russian Invasion 2022) stresses the increase in women’s agency after the Euromaidan; the feminist scholar Tamara Martsenyuk (2022) explains that in Ukraine’s “civilizational battle” between the Russky mir (the Russian world, which, among other things, promotes patriarchal gender norms and criminalises “gay propaganda”) and European values, the latter is winning. The feminist activist Anna Dovgopol (Ukrainian Feminists’ Responses to the Russian Invasion 2022) also shows that the Russian discourses on gender are related to the war: “[g]uns always come after words and the Russian military aggression against Ukraine also came after the immense Russian propaganda” (Ukrainian Feminists' Responses to the Russian Invasion 2022).

The emancipatory trend has further intensified with Russia’s full-scale invasion, as Ukrainian women have mobilised in multiple ways in terms of military and civilian resistance to the invader, both inside Ukraine and abroad (see Phillips and Martsenyuk 2023 for a detailed account). The human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk explains that “women are everywhere: they have joined the territorial defence, they are engaged in logistics, provide medical care at the forefront, document war crimes … ” (FES 2022, 84). Some feminists even argue that due to their permanent resistance, Ukrainian women have managed to change gender stereotypes and models in the army and society in general (Chesova 2022). At the informal level, women have become very active and visible as local leaders of humanitarian work (UN Women and CARE International 2022, 46). This led to more visibility and influence for grassroots feminist, women’s rights and LGBTQIA + organisations, whose efforts are seen as complementary to the work led by local administrations (UN Women and CARE International 2022, 47).

Their revolution through resistance also includes the unprecedented feminist calls for arming Ukraine, as they argue that amidst Russia’s imperial violence, “pacifism kills” (Tsymbalyuk and Zamuruieva 2022). Such a narrative came as a surprise to many Western feminists raised with the intellectual tradition of anti-militarism (e.g. Enloe 2007). Ukrainian and other Central and Eastern European (CEE) feminists (see Graff 2022, Hendl 2022) have, however, been critical of the “abstract pacifism” and war theorising of privileged feminists that disregards liberation wars and local voices as exemplified in the Feminist Resistance Against War manifesto (see Zlobina 2022). As Zlobina aptly states: “As a feminist I say #ArmUkraineNow. And then I will develop a feminist international policy designed for reality.” The perceived “westsplaining”⁴ related to the lack of understanding of Russia’s war as neo-imperial (see Zlobina 2022, Kassymbekova 2023), also led to the publication of the Ukrainian feminist manifesto “The Right to Resist” (The Feminist Initiative Group 2022) and calls for decolonisation of feminist approaches to military issues by taking into account self-defence in liberation wars against imperialist aggressor (e.g. Feminist Perspectives on Russia’s War against Ukraine 2022, The Feminist Initiative Group 2022, Zlobina 2022). Ukrainian feminists make clear that they understand the risks of militarisation but they still argue that they are left with no other option if they want to survive (Tsymbalyuk and Zamuruieva 2022). Importantly, it is feminists again who are also starting to raise the urgent issues of the long-term gendered consequences of the invasion. The activist Marta Chumalo (Chesova 2022) even suggests that while the discourse that celebrates masculinity is now to some extent needed, it may still harm women’s rights in the long term.

It is already apparent that the invasion is having profound gendered impacts which could affect the transformation of the post-war gender order. The rapid analysis conducted by UN Women and CARE International (2022) in co-operation with local feminists reveals that the humanitarian crisis caused by the invasion is exacerbating pre-existing intersectional inequalities. Women’s organisations are also concerned about the decrease of women’s participation in formal decision-making processes at the local level and the strengthened role of military administrations in wartime decision-making (UN Women and CARE International 2022, 45). Concerns are high about the possible threats to gender progress, especially as the gendered impacts of the invasion are revealed but not prioritised in the government’s responses. There has been a decrease in services and in their access to survivors of gender-based violence, which has been on the rise (UN Women and CARE International 2022, 37). According to Chumalo (Feminist Workshop 2022), whose Lviv-based NGO has provided shelters to displaced women, the state needs to develop a systemic response to wartime sexual violence. Doubts also persist about whether the stories of women heroines will be enough to significantly influence the post-war gender order (Feminist Workshop 2022). These doubts are further strengthened with the discussions on Ukraine’s recovery which is blind to social reproduction (see Lyubchenko 2022), in contrast to the demands of Ukrainian feminists to prioritise social infrastructure including schools, hospitals and nurseries (The Feminist Initiative Group 2022).

Conclusion: towards countering illiberal gender orders in Europe and beyond

As we write, the Russian war on Ukraine continues as not only a deeply gendered genocidal aggression towards a sovereign state. What is novel and alarming about it is that from its very beginning, it has been conceived as a contestation of Russia’s illiberal gender order against what Russia imagines as Europe’s decadence. Gender and sexual equalities are an important part of the EU project, but they are even more centrally posited in the Russian counter-narrative, in which they become the fulcra of the resistance against the spread of Western values and against the Europeanisation both within Russia and without. In this sense, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not a simple power grab, but an attempt at countering the centripetal tendencies that are not primarily military, but cultural (despite all the Russian talk about the danger of “NATO expansion”). In this narrative, the fate of Ukraine is central: If Ukraine, the cradle of Russian culture, can undergo an emancipatory transformation, then the identity of Russia as a distinct civilisational project is threatened as well, or so the Russian President seems to believe.

We have demonstrated that gender has been central to every aspect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the preparatory discursive practices and its justification on the grounds of protecting traditional values to the genocidal violence committed on Ukrainians. But Russia’s illiberal gender order which has produced the war on Ukraine is also a warning signal for the EU’s security. The war represents a critical juncture for the role gender plays in European security and therefore also a new opportunity for moving European security to a comprehensive feminist security trajectory. The biggest security crisis in Europe since the Second World War is not a purely military conflict. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a continuation of the discursive and political struggle with Ukraine and Europe which was carefully built-up during Putin’s rule. Already prior to February 2022, Russia’s re-masculinisation grounded in Orthodox fundamentalism, homophobia and its neo-traditionalist ideology effectively contributed to sustaining public support for the aggression against Ukraine (Romanets 2017). It is this hypermasculine construction that enabled the invasion.

The neo-traditionalist ideology has, however, failed in Ukraine. We have demonstrated that it was the emancipatory elements that play a fundamental role in Ukraine’s resistance. We echo Phillips and Martsenyuk (2023) who show that women as autonomous agents have been a crucial part of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression, carving out new roles for themselves. In other words, emancipation can become a powerful tool for societal resilience against authoritarianism. But a discursive shift and new policies towards gender and sexual equalities alone will not guarantee a fully-fledged societal transformation, which constitutes a grey zone the future of which has not been decided yet. But the challenge goes beyond Ukraine itself. While the EU must counter the war on the ground, it also has to address the discursive conflict, which also rages in the EU itself. In the past decade, the EU has encountered an ever-stronger transnational anti-gender mobilisation, which is based on an alliance between religious fundamentalists and right-wing populists (Korolczuk and Graff 2018, 798). A recent report on anti-gender funding in Europe shows that Russia accounted for 26.6% of the total spending of 707.2 million USD between 2009 and 2018, which was the second biggest share after that of the EU (66.9%), while 11.5% has come from the United States (Datta 2021, 12). Russian anti-gender funding in Europe comes from entities linked to Russian oligarchs, dark-money laundromats and state-funded agencies and aims at supporting anti-EU, anti-liberal and anti-human rights actors and agendas (Datta 2021, 27). The Russian invasion of Ukraine is thus a dark reminder of the fact that the transnational anti-gender mobilisation must be considered a key factor affecting the EU’s security. This requires strengthening democracies’ resilience by confronting anti-feminist movements as part of strengthening the EU’s security.

Finally, the feminist analysis of the EU as a gender security actor must be based on inclusive knowledge exchanges and local feminist voices. The Russian invasion of Ukraine shows that studying local gendered discourses and practices is crucial. There is much to be learned from the current security crisis, including by carefully re-examining feminist pacifist positions, and re-imagining what feminist security means if it is based on shared experiences of those hitherto marginalised, and who are, simultaneously, fighting a war of liberation. This also requires taking a decolonising approach and reflecting on the trauma of the Russian imperial violence and its consequences for European security. As for Ukraine’s EU integration, it is important to build it on locally-driven needs and feminist visions instead of top-down, imposed gender policies as such an approach could easily lead to an illiberal backlash.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Leading scholars of genocide have referred to Russia’s war on Ukraine as genocide. See Dudko, O. 2022. A conceptual limbo of genocide: Russian rhetoric, mass atrocities in Ukraine, and the current definition's limits. Canadian Slavonic Papers, 64(2–3), 133–145.

2 The only exception where President Putin made a concrete reference to such a topic is when he talked about Russian children and the horrors the West would unleash upon them by changing their gender and “experimenting with their souls”.

3 The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence

4 This term was coined by CEE scholars in response to the Western tendencies to speak over Ukraine, especially among traditional realist scholars and opinionmakers. See e.g. https://newrepublic.com/article/165603/carlson-russia-ukraine-imperialism-nato