hi, this is Olesya Gerasimenko. if you haven’t read it yet, I strongly suggest you do ...

hi, this is Olesya Gerasimenko. if you haven’t read it yet, I strongly suggest you check out our investigation into how the Russian Defense Ministry is solving the shortage of military medics in the "SMO" by recruiting women in penal colonies. they are also used to haul corpses off the battlefield, because there aren’t enough hands for evacuating dead soldiers. they are also used to satisfy sexual needs, some with consent and some by force.

have you read it? now try to answer my question. guess what soldiers and their relatives were arguing about for several days in the chat where one of the investigation’s heroines posted her first video message about rape?

answer: how come she has a manicure! the arguments ranged from “why does she allow herself that” to “that means she was never on the front line.”

the subject of women at war is always painful. “in general, if women have ended up at war, that’s a sign the country is in really fucking bad shape,” one Defense Ministry employee told me. “if I were a commander and they told me women were about to be brought into my unit, I’d do everything I could to refuse.”

while we were preparing this piece, I heard story after story: how, out of jealousy, they threw a grenade into a dugout. how soldiers killed themselves after not getting affection in return. how a convicted woman, five months pregnant, hauled corpses from the front line, but survived, “just broke her ribs.” how commanders lied that a new law had been passed under which all prisoners would be sent back to finish serving their sentences after the "SMO." how some convicted women suddenly realized that their prison terms had already ended, but they were remaining at war indefinitely.

but people in the chats were not arguing about that. not about coercion. not about violence. not about what women are doing in this war at all. but about the manicure. details like that sometimes show better than any opinion poll how deeply the patriarchy promoted by the authorities has been accepted in our society.

we can spend years getting used to war, to killings, to torture, to the forced recruitment of prisoners. and keep discussing whether a woman matches our ideas of what a “real victim” should look like.

read the piece on the Verstka website (with VPN):

link not working? read it here.

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Verstka

“They didn’t humiliate me in the colony the way they did in the army”: how the Defense Ministry sends convicted women to war

Convicted women at the front face sexual violence, extortion, threats of “zeroing out,” and commanders’ impunity