A Nobel Prize winner, Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich in 1985 published a book “The Unwomanly Face of War”. At the time, the collection of women Red Army fighters’ testimonials from World War II was censored: the Soviet authorities wanted to show the victorious, not the filthy side of the war.
However, war is filthy, and it is brutal. The one going on in Ukraine right now is no exception. Its face might be unwomanly, but women are very much involved and get to face its repercussions and the lies that surround it. On both sides: in Ukraine and in Russia.
In his deceptive newspeak televised on 24 February, with which he began the open invasion, Putin tried to justify the war by not calling it a war (it is not the first time the Kremlin does this) and by using the well-known Kremlin playbook of disinformation. But the reality check from the ground raises a question, if it is not a war – then:
- Why have 2 million refugees so far crossed into neighbouring countries? Most of them are women and children, forced to face all the hardships that come with leaving your home, country and loved ones.
- Why do pictures and video footage show women and men working in shelters as doctors and medical personnel, helping those in need, while bombs are falling on their cities?
- Why were babies born in Kyiv metro station, hospital basements and shelters around Ukraine, instead of entering the world in a safe environment?
- Why are there those who dies, while trying to help whenever they can and making very tough choices to stay or to leave?
- Why, alongside the women serving in Ukraine’s army, are there those who are learning to make Molotov cocktails or who took a rifle and joined the resistance?
If this is not a war, why is the need to keep the newspeak vocabulary right so dire that it leads to pulling the plug on the few independent voices left in Russia? The authorities are going after their own people, who dare to say нет воине (no to war), women and children included. Like a survivor of the siege of Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg), Yelena Osipova, who was marched away for holding anti-nuclear placards.
If this is not a war, why does the Kremlin not give much information to worried mothers and fathers who are looking for their sons or relatives, reportedly confused about their assignment to train or to invade? Russia’s ministry of defence announced the first numbers of human losses only a week after the start of the invasion. It also shut down the Ukrainian website Ищи своих (look for your people) which might have helped to find a relative. Why did the Mothers’ Committee, an NGO advocating for soldiers’ rights, become a contact point for the panicking relatives of Russian soldiers?
In 2014 the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of St. Petersburg was put on a foreign agent list after it published information about the death of nine Russian servicemen during military operations on the territory of Ukraine.
In the meantime, Russia’s ministry of education released a 30-minute video in which a 12-year-old girl is “enlightened” by two presenters about the Kremlin’s version of recent history. Putin himself also did some explanation about the no-fly zone, surrounded by women pilots and flight attendants carefully listening to him. Is that meant to soften the unwomanly face of war?
The Kremlin disinformation machine has a history of denigrating and objectifying women, trying to scare its audiences with “totalitarian feminism” and even ridiculing the MeToo movement, basically equalling empowerment to the collapse of Western world and attack on tradition values.
When the war will be over and testimonials of women from both sides, Ukraine and Russia, will be written, which version will be published and believed: that told by a daughter hiding in shelled Kharkiv, or her mother’s, who did not want to believe her?
If it is not a war, why then do they have to have this conversation?