Gendered Frontlines: Men, Women, and the Politics of Protection in the Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2026

This thesis argues that dominant narratives of female victimhood and male agency obscure the real gender architecture of the Russia-Ukraine war — from the male-predominant pattern of sexual violence in detention to women's exclusion from peace talks — all flowing from a single protection order that

Abstract

This thesis examines the gendered dimensions of the Russia-Ukraine war from the full-scale invasion of February 2022 to mid-2026, asking how gender structures the war’s conduct, its human consequences, and the politics surrounding its eventual resolution. Drawing on feminist International Relations theory, particularly the work of Cynthia Enloe, Laura Sjoberg, Nira Yuval-Davis, and Cynthia Cockburn, and employing a qualitative desk study based on thematic analysis of United Nations documentation, human rights reporting, and scholarly literature, the thesis advances three arguments. First, the war has simultaneously expanded and constrained Ukrainian women’s agency: unprecedented military participation coexists with feminised displacement, an overloaded care economy, and near-total exclusion from peace negotiations. Second, dominant gender narratives obscure as much as they reveal. United Nations verification data from 2025 show that documented conflict-related sexual violence in the Ukraine context overwhelmingly targeted men in detention, while Ukraine’s martial law exit ban constitutes one of Europe’s most consequential gender-differentiated policies, yet neither phenomenon is commonly analysed in gender terms. Third, gender is not merely an effect of this war but one of its drivers: the Russian state’s project of remasculinisation and legislated “traditional values” forms part of the ideological architecture of the invasion itself. The thesis concludes that a Women, Peace and Security agenda reduced to counting women’s presence, without confronting militarised masculinity, male victimhood, and the political economy of care, will fail both analytically and practically in the Ukrainian case.

Keywords: gender, feminist IR, Russia-Ukraine war, conflict-related sexual violence, Women, Peace and Security, militarised masculinity, displacement

1. Introduction

1.1 Research problem and relevance

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, commentary across politics and media reached instinctively for a gendered grammar: women and children fleeing westward, men staying behind to fight, a hypermasculine aggressor state confronting a nation in arms. Four years later the war continues. As of June 2026 Russian forces occupy roughly 116,856 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory, the front line has been largely static for months, and successive negotiation attempts have failed to produce a settlement (Russia Matters, 2026). The war’s gendered dimensions have meanwhile hardened into structures: approximately 70,000 women serve in Ukraine’s armed forces; millions of predominantly female refugees have reorganised their lives across Europe; a generation of Ukrainian men lives under mobilisation and an exit ban; Russian society has been remade around the figure of the soldier; and women remain almost entirely absent from the rooms in which the war’s end is being negotiated (UN, 2025; O’Sullivan, 2019; UN Women and CARE, 2022).

The research problem this thesis addresses is twofold. Empirically, the gendered consequences of Europe’s largest war since 1945 are still being documented piecemeal, scattered across United Nations reporting, human rights monitoring, and country-specific studies, and they require synthesis. Analytically, and more importantly, the dominant frames through which those consequences are understood, frames of female victimhood and male agency inherited from decades of policy discourse, fit the Ukrainian case poorly in ways that are theoretically instructive. A war in which verified conflict-related sexual violence predominantly targets men, in which tens of thousands of women bear arms, and in which the principal legal constraint on individual freedom of movement applies exclusively to men, is a war that tests feminist conflict analysis against its own categories. This thesis takes up that test.

The relevance for peace and development studies is direct. The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, anchored in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000), is the principal normative framework through which gender enters peacemaking practice. Ukraine has a National Action Plan, updated in 2025 to address war-related needs (UN, 2025). Whether that framework can do meaningful work in this war, or whether it functions as what critics call a box-ticking liberal instrument, is a question with consequences for how the eventual peace is built and for whom.

1.2 Aim and research questions

The aim of this thesis is to critically analyse how gender structures the experience, conduct, and politics of the Russia-Ukraine war between February 2022 and June 2026, and to assess what the case reveals about the adequacy of prevailing feminist and policy frameworks for understanding gender in contemporary interstate war.

Three research questions guide the analysis:

RQ1: How has the war reconfigured gendered roles, vulnerabilities, and forms of agency in Ukraine, among combatants, civilians, and the displaced?

RQ2: How do dominant gender narratives surrounding the war compare with the documented empirical record, and what do the discrepancies reveal?

RQ3: What role does gender play in the war’s political dynamics, including Russian war ideology and the negotiation processes intended to end the conflict?

1.3 Delimitations

The thesis concentrates on the period from the full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022 to June 2026, while acknowledging that the war began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Donbas, a phase that generated its own gendered dynamics and scholarship (Martsenyuk, Grytsenko and Kvit, 2016; O’Sullivan, 2019). Geographically the focus is on Ukraine, Russia, and the principal refugee-receiving states; the analysis does not treat the war’s global economic ripple effects, which have their own gendered character. Conceptually, the thesis understands gender relationally, as concerning men and masculinities as much as women, and it addresses sexual and gender minorities where the material allows, while recognising that documentation on LGBTQI+ experiences in the war remains thin. Finally, this is a desk study: no primary interviews were conducted, a choice defended in the methodology chapter but acknowledged as a limitation.

1.4 Disposition

Chapter 2 reviews previous research. Chapter 3 develops the theoretical framework. Chapter 4 presents the methodology, material, and limitations. Chapter 5 provides background on the war. Chapter 6 contains the analysis, organised into six thematic sections. Chapter 7 discusses the findings against the theoretical framework and research questions, and Chapter 8 concludes.

2. Previous research

Scholarship on gender and the Russia-Ukraine war builds on three older literatures. The first is feminist security studies’ general account of war as a gendered institution, discussed as theory in Chapter 3. The second is the regional literature on gender in post-Soviet militarism. Eichler’s (2012) study of conscription in post-Soviet Russia demonstrated how the Russian state’s legitimacy crises were managed partly through the remasculinisation of military service, while Sperling (2015) documented how the Putin regime made performative machismo and the denigration of femininity and homosexuality central instruments of political legitimation. This work proved prescient: the ideological repertoire Sperling described in 2015, including the framing of liberal gender politics as Western civilisational aggression, became explicit justification for the 2022 invasion.

The third literature concerns gender in Ukraine specifically. Martsenyuk, Grytsenko and Kvit’s (2016) “Invisible Battalion” project, a sociological study based on in-depth interviews with women serving in the Anti-Terrorist Operation zone, documented women’s participation in the Donbas war at a time when Ukrainian law formally barred women from combat positions, forcing female soldiers to be registered as cooks, seamstresses or clerks while serving as snipers, gunners and reconnaissance soldiers. The project, led by the activist Maria Berlinska, fed directly into the legislative reform of 2016-2018 that opened combat positions to women. O’Sullivan (2019) analysed Ukraine’s early adoption of the WPS agenda, arguing that the 2016 National Action Plan, the first ever adopted by a country in active conflict, was shaped by civil society and international organisations and took a narrowly militarised form that risked instrumentalising women for military effectiveness rather than transforming gendered power. The most recent scholarship extends this critique: Kähkönen’s (2025) analysis of Ukraine’s successive National Action Plans against the literature on “transformative” WPS implementation finds that the plans privilege women’s contribution to the war effort over the structural change the agenda nominally seeks.

Since 2022 a rapidly growing body of work has examined the full-scale war. Rapid gender analyses by UN Women and CARE (2022) documented the feminisation of displacement and the collapse of care infrastructure in the war’s first months. Human rights monitoring by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) and the Independent International Commission of Inquiry has documented conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) by Russian forces, including against men in detention. Policy-oriented research has tracked women’s expanding military service and the persistent absence of women from negotiation formats (UN, 2025; GIWPS, 2025). What remains underdeveloped, and what this thesis attempts, is critical synthesis: reading these empirical strands against each other and against feminist theory, with attention to where the evidence resists the frameworks built to interpret it.

3. Theoretical framework

3.1 Feminist International Relations: where are the women, and where are the men?

The thesis is grounded in feminist IR’s foundational claim that war is made possible by gendered ideas and gendered labour. Enloe’s (2014) injunction to ask “where are the women?” directs attention to the unacknowledged work, of soldiers’ wives, nurses, sex workers, mothers, refugees, that sustains military systems, and to the political decisions disguised as natural arrangements that allocate that work. Tickner (1992) showed how the discipline’s core concepts, security above all, were built on masculinised premises that equated protection with armed statehood while ignoring the insecurities, economic, bodily, structural, that states themselves inflict on women.

Sjoberg (2013) extends this into a theory of war’s gendered narratives. Wars are justified and narrated through the logic of the “protection racket”: masculine protectors defend feminised protected, and the protected’s gratitude and obedience are the price of protection. Crucially, the framework cuts in both directions. It explains not only the marginalisation of women but the disposability of men, whose conscription is rendered politically invisible precisely because the protector role is naturalised as male. Carpenter (2006) demonstrates the operational consequences: civilian protection regimes systematically fail adult men, who are presumed to be combatants, while gender-based violence against men goes unrecognised because the category “gender-based” has been tacitly equated with “female”. These insights are central to RQ2, since the Ukrainian case, as the analysis will show, produces exactly the anomalies Carpenter and Sjoberg predict.

3.2 Gender and nation

Yuval-Davis (1997) theorises women’s specific positioning in nationalist projects: as biological reproducers of the nation, as transmitters of its culture, and as symbolic markers of its boundaries and honour. In wartime this positioning intensifies. Attacks on women become attacks on the nation’s body; women’s fertility becomes a strategic resource; and the removal of children becomes a form of national erasure. The framework illuminates phenomena as diverse as pronatalist policy in both Russia and Ukraine, the symbolic weight attached to CRSV, and the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, for which the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and the Russian children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova in March 2023 (ICC, 2023). That the second warrant names a woman is itself theoretically significant: as Sjoberg and Gentry (2007) argue, women’s participation in political violence is consistently narrated through exceptionalising tropes, and Lvova-Belova’s role as the maternal face of deportation exemplifies how femininity can be weaponised by, not only against, a war machine.

3.3 The continuum of violence

Cockburn (2004) argues that gendered violence runs on a continuum across war and peace: domestic violence, economic coercion, militarised prostitution, and battlefield rape are connected expressions of the same power structures, and the analytical separation of “wartime” from “peacetime” violence obscures their continuity. The concept disciplines the analysis in two ways. It directs attention to violence that the war intensifies without creating, such as domestic violence in displaced and veteran households, and it warns against treating a ceasefire as the end of gendered insecurity, since demobilisation historically redistributes violence into the home.

3.4 The WPS agenda and its critics

Resolution 1325 and its successor resolutions constitute the policy operationalisation of feminist insight: participation, protection, prevention, and relief and recovery. The agenda’s critics, however, note its tendency to essentialise women as peaceful, to reduce participation to numerical presence (“add women and stir”), to fold feminist goals into military effectiveness arguments, and to ignore masculinities altogether (O’Sullivan, 2019; cf. True, 2012, on the political economy the agenda neglects). The thesis uses WPS both as an object of analysis, since Ukraine is a WPS implementing state, and as a framework whose adequacy the case tests.

4. Methodology

4.1 Research design

The thesis is a qualitative desk study with an abductive logic: it moves between theoretical expectations derived from feminist IR and an empirical record that sometimes confirms and sometimes confounds them, treating the points of friction as the most analytically productive sites (cf. Danermark et al., 2002). The design is a single case study of the Russia-Ukraine war, where the case is understood not as a sample from which to generalise statistically but as a theoretically strategic instance: an interstate, high-intensity, conventionally fought war in Europe, precisely the kind of war that the largely civil-war-derived literature on gender and conflict has had least opportunity to examine.

4.2 Material

The empirical material consists of three layers. The first is United Nations documentation: the Secretary-General’s annual reports on conflict-related sexual violence, including the report covering 2025 presented to the Security Council in May 2026; HRMMU periodic reports; and the UN Country Analysis for Ukraine of December 2025. The second layer is reporting and data from human rights organisations, humanitarian agencies (UNHCR, UN Women, CARE), and specialised monitors. The third is peer-reviewed scholarship on gender in Ukraine, Russia, and war generally. Media reporting is used sparingly, for events not yet covered by the foregoing.

4.3 Analytical method

The material was analysed thematically, following the staged procedure of familiarisation, coding, and theme development described by Braun and Clarke (2006). Codes were generated both deductively from the theoretical framework (protection narratives, reproduction of the nation, continuum of violence, participation) and inductively from the material (detention, exit ban, deskilling, pronatalism). Six themes resulted, which structure Chapter 6.

4.4 Limitations, source criticism, and ethics

Three limitations require emphasis. First, wartime data are produced inside the war’s information economy. Both belligerents have propaganda incentives; Ukrainian authorities have an interest in documenting Russian atrocities, Russia denies access to occupied territories and to its own detention facilities, and UN verification therefore systematically undercounts violations while counting them asymmetrically, in ways discussed substantively in section 6.2. Figures are treated throughout as verified minima, not estimates of prevalence. Second, the absence of fieldwork means the thesis cannot access the experiential dimension that feminist epistemology prizes; it compensates by privileging sources that themselves rest on survivor testimony. Third, the author writes from a Swedish, European, civilian position, materially proximate to the refugee reception analysed in section 6.3 and distant from the violence; this positionality shapes what appears salient and is acknowledged rather than resolved. Ethically, the thesis follows the principle of analysing patterns rather than reproducing graphic individual detail, particularly regarding sexual violence.

5. Background

Russia’s war against Ukraine began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the instigation of armed conflict in Donbas, escalating to full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022. The invasion failed in its initial objective of rapid regime change; the war settled into high-intensity attritional fighting across a front of roughly a thousand kilometres, punctuated by Ukrainian counteroffensives in 2022, the failed counteroffensive of 2023, and grinding Russian advances through 2024 and 2025. Negotiation attempts, from the Istanbul talks of spring 2022 to the United States-brokered processes of 2025, have not ended the fighting; as of mid-2026 the war continues, with Russia occupying approximately 19 per cent of Ukrainian territory and monthly territorial change measured in tens of square kilometres (Russia Matters, 2026).

The human toll frames everything that follows. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides have been killed or wounded. As of mid-2022 more than five million Ukrainians had already fled abroad, the figure later stabilising at around six million refugees recorded across Europe, with millions more internally displaced (European Parliament, 2022), and Ukraine’s pre-war demographic crisis has deepened sharply. Russia, for its part, has lost emigrants in the hundreds of thousands, militarised its economy and public sphere, and entrenched an authoritarianism in which, as the analysis will show, gender politics is not decoration but architecture.

6.1 Women under arms: participation without transformation?

Ukrainian women’s military participation in this war is historically remarkable in scale. An estimated 70,000 women serve in the armed forces, around 5,500 of them in combat positions (UN, 2025). This is the product of a decade-long trajectory: from the legal fiction era documented by the Invisible Battalion study, when women fighting in Donbas were registered in clerical roles (Martsenyuk, Grytsenko and Kvit, 2016), through the 2018 reform (Law No. 2523-VIII) granting women formal equality of status and access to combat positions in the armed forces (Balkan Insight, 2023), to the post-2022 expansion across infantry, artillery, air defence, drone operations, and the medical service (NPR, 2025).

Three critical observations complicate any straightforward emancipation narrative. First, participation has outrun institutional adaptation. For much of the full-scale war, female soldiers were issued body armour, boots, and uniforms designed for male bodies, a deficiency only gradually remedied through volunteer organisations and later procurement reform; the persistence of sexual harassment and the weakness of complaint mechanisms were acknowledged only belatedly, when in February 2026 parliament passed dedicated legislation (Law No. 13037) to combat discrimination and sexual harassment in the armed forces, a reform driven substantially by the women veterans’ movement Veteranka (New Voice of Ukraine, 2026). Together these indicate that the institution absorbed women faster than it changed for them. This is the pattern Enloe (2014) would predict: militaries seek women’s labour while resisting the renegotiation of the masculine institutional culture that labour subsidises.

Second, the dominant justification for women’s service has been functional rather than rights-based: the army needs personnel, and women supply it. O’Sullivan’s (2019) warning about Ukraine’s WPS implementation, that gender equality risks being valued as a force multiplier rather than a good in itself, has been borne out. The distinction matters because functional inclusion is reversible. Histories of twentieth-century mobilisations, from Soviet women pilots to Western factory workers, show that women incorporated for wartime necessity are routinely demobilised, materially and symbolically, when the necessity passes. Whether Ukraine’s veteran policy, and movements such as the Veteranka women veterans’ organisation (New Voice of Ukraine, 2026), can prevent that reversal is one of the war’s open questions.

Third, women’s military service has been narratively assimilated rather than allowed to disturb the gender order. Media representation oscillates between the glamourised woman warrior and the mother-soldier fighting for her children, both of which, as Sjoberg and Gentry (2007) argue regarding violent women generally, domesticate female agency by routing it through acceptable femininities. The figure that remains illegible is the unremarkable female soldier, professional, neither icon nor anomaly, and her illegibility measures how far the protection narrative retains its grip even as its empirical basis erodes.

6.2 Conflict-related sexual violence and the politics of recognition

CRSV by Russian forces has been documented since the war’s first weeks, from the atrocities uncovered in Bucha and other de-occupied areas in 2022 onward, encompassing rape, gang rape, sexualised torture, and sexual violence in the context of so-called filtration and occupation (OHCHR, 2023). The United Nations placed the Russian armed and security forces on the Secretary-General’s list of parties credibly suspected of patterns of CRSV, and the report covering 2025, presented in May 2026, verified 310 cases perpetrated by Russian forces (UNifeed, 2026; GIWPS, 2025).

The composition of those verified cases demands attention, because it inverts the global pattern. Of the 310 victims, 280 were men, 26 were women, and four were girls; the violence, including rape, genital mutilation, electric shocks and beatings to the genitals, was perpetrated primarily against Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees, across at least 50 official and 22 unofficial detention facilities (UNifeed, 2026; GIWPS, 2025). Globally, the same report documents 9,788 CRSV cases in 2025, more than double the 2024 figure, and describes them as overwhelmingly targeting women and girls (UN News, 2026). The Ukraine context is thus the conspicuous exception within the global dataset: a theatre where verified sexual violence is predominantly male-directed.

Two critical points follow, and both require care. The first concerns measurement. The male predominance in verified cases partly reflects verification conditions rather than underlying prevalence. Russia denies UN monitors access to occupied territories and to its detention system, so cases are verified mainly upon detainees’ release through prisoner exchanges, a population that is overwhelmingly male (UNifeed, 2026); the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine likewise found that among the victims of sexual violence it documented, who were both men and women, civilians and prisoners of war, the majority were men, most of them prisoners of war subjected to rape, attacks on the genitals, electric shocks and forced nudity in detention (OHCHR, 2025). Sexual violence against civilian women in occupied territory, where no monitor can go and survivors face occupation authorities rather than exchange procedures, is structurally underdocumented. The honest conclusion is not that men are the war’s primary CRSV victims, but that the data illuminate detention and leave occupation dark, and that claims about prevalence in either direction exceed the evidence.

The second point concerns recognition, and here Carpenter’s (2006) argument is vindicated almost clinically. The international policy architecture for CRSV, its mandates, programming, survivor services, and public framing, was built around female victims; the Special Representative’s own presentation of the 2025 data foregrounded violence “overwhelmingly targeting women and girls” globally even while reporting a Ukraine caseload that was over 90 per cent male (UNifeed, 2026). Ukrainian male survivors of sexualised torture confront a service landscape with few programmes designed for them and a cultural script in which male victimhood is unspeakable, compounded for survivors by stigma that equates penetration with emasculation. A feminist analysis worth the name must hold both truths simultaneously: that the global burden of CRSV falls massively on women and girls, and that in this war the recognition deficit currently falls hardest on men. Treating these as competing claims, rather than as joint products of the same gender order that assigns victimhood to femininity, is precisely the analytical error the continuum framework warns against.

Finally, the reproductive dimension of Russian violence extends beyond sexual violence narrowly defined. The forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia, the subject of the ICC arrest warrants issued on 17 March 2023 against Putin and the Russian children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for the war crimes of unlawful deportation and transfer of children (ICC, 2023), is, in Yuval-Davis’s (1997) terms, an assault on the nation’s reproduction: the removal of its next generation and their re-socialisation as Russians. That international criminal law reached this conduct before most others in the war, and that one of its two named architects is a woman performing maternal care as the idiom of abduction, condenses the thesis’s theoretical claims into a single case.

6.3 Displacement: the feminisation of flight and the labour of refuge

The refugee movement triggered by the invasion was the largest in Europe since the Second World War, and in its first phase it was demographically extraordinary: because men aged 18 to 60 were barred from leaving Ukraine, around 90 per cent of those who fled were women and children (European Parliament, 2022; UN Women and CARE, 2022). The European Union’s activation of the Temporary Protection Directive on 4 March 2022, the first time the instrument had been used since it entered into force in 2001, granted this population immediate residence, work rights, and services, a response without precedent in EU asylum history (European Parliament, 2022).

Critical analysis must register both the achievement and its shadows. The reception of Ukrainian refugees was strikingly more generous than that extended to the predominantly Middle Eastern and African arrivals of 2015, a contrast that European commentators themselves sometimes articulated in openly racialised terms of cultural and phenotypical proximity. The gender composition was part of this political economy of sympathy: a refugee population coded as women and children fitted the protection narrative perfectly, posing no imagined threat of military-age foreign men. Solidarity, in other words, was real, and it was also selective along intersecting lines of race, religion, and gender, a selectivity that third-country nationals fleeing Ukraine, including African and Asian students who reported discrimination at its borders in the war’s first weeks, were widely reported to have experienced directly.

Within host societies, displaced Ukrainian women have lived a familiar gendered bargain. Many arrived with high formal qualifications and have been channelled disproportionately into cleaning, care, hospitality, and other feminised low-wage sectors, a deskilling driven by credential non-recognition, language barriers, and above all by sole responsibility for children whose other parent remained in Ukraine. The single-mother household became, in effect, the basic social unit of the Ukrainian diaspora, with all the time poverty and economic vulnerability that implies. Heightened risks of sexual exploitation and trafficking were identified from the first weeks, the European Parliament noting that the predominance of women and children among the displaced placed them at elevated risk of trafficking, smuggling, and abuse (European Parliament, 2022); displaced women’s vulnerability to such exploitation exemplifies Cockburn’s (2004) continuum: the war did not invent the trafficking economy, it delivered it a population.

Inside Ukraine, the continuum of violence has run through the home as predicted. Domestic and gender-based violence were widely identified as escalating wartime risks, driven by displacement into crowded shelters and host households, economic stress, the circulation of weapons, and the return of traumatised men on rotation or after injury, even as the services that would normally respond, shelters, police capacity, and courts, were degraded by the same war (UN Women and CARE, 2022). Ukraine’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention, approved by the Verkhovna Rada on 20 June 2022 after roughly a decade of parliamentary blockage by religious and conservative opposition (Council of Europe, 2022; Kähkönen, 2025), illustrates a recurrent wartime irony: emergency conditions enabled a feminist legal advance that peacetime politics had refused, even as those same conditions multiplied the violence the Convention addresses. The collapse and partial reconstruction of the care economy belongs to the same ledger. Kindergartens, schools and care institutions closed, went online, or moved underground; the unpaid labour of compensating for them fell almost entirely to women, both those displaced abroad and those who remained; and women’s labour force participation, entrepreneurship, and exhaustion in wartime Ukraine are all functions of this redistribution that conventional war reporting never counts as a war cost. True’s (2012) political economy lens is essential here: the violence of the war includes the quiet violence of who absorbs its unpaid work.

The return question, increasingly salient as the war’s fifth year unfolds, is equally gendered. Whether divided families reunite in Ukraine or abroad will be decided largely by women weighing children’s schooling, safety, and economic prospects, and Ukraine’s reconstruction, and demographic survival, depends on decisions that its government can influence but not command. Reconstruction planning that ignores childcare, schools, and the care economy, treating rebuilding as concrete and energy infrastructure alone, will discover that infrastructure does not repatriate families.

6.4 Men, mobilisation, and the unexamined gender policy

The least theorised gender policy of the war is its most sweeping: Ukraine’s martial law prohibition on men aged 18 to 60 leaving the country, in force continuously since the declaration of martial law on 24 February 2022 and relaxed only in August 2025, when men aged 18 to 22 were permitted to cross the border freely (Kyiv Post, 2025). Several hundred thousand men have nonetheless left, legally or otherwise, with Eurostat data indicating roughly 860,000 adult Ukrainian men resident in the EU by 2025 (Kyiv Post, 2025), and the politics of mobilisation, recruitment practices, draft evasion, and the periodic scandals surrounding territorial recruitment centres, has become one of Ukrainian domestic politics’ most combustible issues.

Framed in gender terms, the exit ban is a state policy that conditions the most basic liberty, movement, on sex, affecting many millions of people for over four years. Had any European state imposed a comparable restriction on women, the gender analysis would be instant and voluminous. That the ban attracts almost no such analysis confirms Sjoberg’s (2013) account of the protection racket: the male obligation to defend is so naturalised that its coercive enforcement does not register as gender politics at all. This thesis insists that it must. Not because the policy is inexplicable, a state facing existential invasion conscripts its population, and most belligerent states in history have conscripted men, but because the naturalisation itself is the analytical object. Male disposability is the protection narrative’s other face, and the categories “women and children”, fused into Enloe’s (1990) single word “womenandchildren”, do their political work precisely by constructing the adult male as the residual category that owes, rather than receives, protection.

The consequences are concrete. Adult men’s excess vulnerability in this war extends beyond the front: they are the population most exposed to detention, filtration, torture, and, as section 6.2 showed, documented sexual violence in captivity; civilian men in occupied territory live under presumption of combatant status; and the psychological toll of mobilisation, bereavement, and injury accrues to a male population whose access to mental health support is constrained by the same masculinity norms that conscript it. This asymmetry is itself a product of state gender ideology: Trisko Darden’s (2022) analysis of Ukraine’s wartime policy shows how the same decisions that made women’s combatant status largely voluntary forced combatant status on men and effectively denied them civilian status, despite their greater likelihood of being targeted. Veteran reintegration, for the predominantly male hundreds of thousands who will demobilise whenever the war ends, is where Cockburn’s continuum points next: the international record on post-war domestic violence in veteran households is consistent and grim, and Ukraine’s preparation for that redistribution of violence into the home will be a test of whether gender analysis informed wartime planning or merely decorated it.

A genuinely critical feminist account therefore refuses the zero-sum framing in which attention to men’s gendered suffering competes with attention to women’s. Both are produced by the same order. The army that under-equips its female soldiers and the state that exit-bans its male civilians are enforcing the same binary from opposite directions.

6.5 Russia: militarised masculinity as state project

On the Russian side, gender is not a consequence of the war but part of its causal structure. A substantial scholarship preceding 2022 documented the Putin regime’s investment in remasculinisation: the rehabilitation of military service as the core of male citizenship after the post-Soviet humiliations (Eichler, 2012), the leader cult’s performative machismo, and the positioning of feminism and LGBT existence as Western civilisational weapons against Russia (Sperling, 2015). The legislative record translated ideology into law: the 2013 “gay propaganda” statute restricting depictions of “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors, the 2017 partial decriminalisation of domestic violence (US Library of Congress, 2017), the December 2022 expansion of the propaganda ban to all ages, and the November 2023 designation of the “international LGBT movement” as “extremist” (Human Rights Watch, 2023). The invasion of Ukraine was justified within this same idiom, as the defence of “traditional values” against a decadent West, making the war, among other things, the foreign policy of a domestic gender order.

The war has deepened the project. Recruitment has operated through a market in masculinity: large one-time enlistment bonuses, many times the federal minimum and concentrated in Russia’s poorest regions, alongside compensation payments to the families of soldiers killed or wounded, an exchange in which the state purchases male bodies and compensates widows and mothers, converting bereavement into transaction (Congressional Research Service, 2025). Pronatalism has intensified in parallel: 2024 was declared the “Year of the Family”, a federal law against “child-free propaganda” was signed in November 2024, and more than a dozen regions moved to penalise “coercion to abortion”, positioning Russian women’s reproduction as a war resource in exactly the sense Yuval-Davis (1997) theorises (Aleksanteri Institute, 2026).

Russian women’s political agency under these conditions has run through two contrasting channels, and the regime’s differential treatment of them is diagnostic. The Feminist Anti-War Resistance, founded in the invasion’s first days, organised decentralised protest and information work and was designated a “foreign agent” as early as December 2022 and an “undesirable organisation” in 2024 (New Humanist, 2024): explicitly feminist opposition was treated as enmity. The soldiers’ wives movement Put Domoy (The Way Home), demanding the rotation of mobilised men, was tolerated considerably longer, spaces being allowed for its protests in central Moscow, before it too was added to the “foreign agents” register in mid-2024 (The Moscow Times, 2024), because it spoke from within sanctioned femininity, wives and mothers claiming their men, before its critique sharpened. The pattern reproduces a long Russian and Soviet history in which maternal protest is the one civic voice militarism cannot easily silence, and it confirms the theoretical point that gender conformity can be a political resource and a political cage simultaneously.

6.6 The negotiating table: WPS at the point of decision

Ukraine entered the full-scale war as a WPS implementing state, with a National Action Plan dating from 2016 and updated in 2025 to address conflict-related sexual violence and displacement (UN, 2025; O’Sullivan, 2019). Women’s civil society has been among the war’s most organised constituencies, and in February 2025 a coalition of Ukrainian organisations formally appealed to the President to include women in peace talks and recovery planning (UN, 2025).

The record of actual negotiations is the agenda’s indictment, and it can be stated concretely. In the Minsk-era talks between 2014 and 2019, Ukraine’s delegations included at least ten men and only two women, the humanitarian envoy Iryna Gerashchenko and the civil-society figure Olga Aivazovska, while Russia sent none (CFR, 2025). The pattern held under the full-scale war: the United States-brokered talks conducted in Saudi Arabia in 2025 proceeded with no women among the lead negotiators on any side (CFR, 2025), and the UN’s own country analysis concedes that women remain underrepresented in formal peace negotiations and high-level decision-making (UN, 2025). This is not a local anomaly but the global norm the WPS agenda was created to change and has barely shifted: across major peace processes between 1992 and 2018, women constituted roughly 13 per cent of negotiators, 3 per cent of mediators, and 4 per cent of signatories (UN Women, 2020). A quarter century after Resolution 1325, in a war involving a state that pioneered WPS implementation, fought across a continent that considers itself the agenda’s heartland, the rooms where the war’s end is being drafted look much as they would have in 1945.

The critical question is what to make of this. The liberal reading treats it as an implementation gap, to be closed by advocacy and quotas. The more uncomfortable reading, suggested by the WPS critique reviewed in section 3.4, is that the agenda was structured to be ignorable at the point of decision: its participation pillar carries moral but no enforcement weight, and its protection pillar, by far the best resourced, casts women as the war’s objects rather than its political subjects. The empirical correlation that motivated WPS in the first place, that peace processes involving women are associated with markedly more durable settlements, with one widely cited estimate putting the increase in the probability of an agreement lasting at least fifteen years at around 35 per cent (UN Women, 2020), is therefore not even being tested in the European war where the stakes are highest. Moreover, a WPS framework that has nothing to say about mobilised men, male detainees, or militarised masculinity, the actual gender architecture of this war as documented in sections 6.2, 6.4, and 6.5, arrives at the table speaking only half the language the conflict requires.

6.7 Intersections: age, disability, and sexuality

A gender analysis confined to the woman/man binary would miss populations whose wartime experience is structured by gender in combination with other positions. Three deserve note, with the caveat that documentation is thinnest precisely here.

Older women constitute a distinctive category of the war’s victims. Ukraine’s frontline regions were demographically aged before 2022, and those least able or willing to flee, disproportionately elderly women living alone on minimal pensions, became the residual population of shelled and occupied towns. They appear in casualty and humanitarian data in large numbers but in policy frameworks almost nowhere, since both the WPS agenda’s implicit subject (the woman of reproductive age) and humanitarian targeting models fit them poorly. Persons with disabilities, a population the war itself expands daily through traumatic injury, face evacuation, shelter, and service systems designed for the able-bodied; the gendered division of care means that the labour of supporting them, too, defaults to women.

For LGBTQI+ Ukrainians the war has produced a paradoxical conjuncture. On one side, openly queer soldiers, organised in networks such as Ukrainian LGBT Military for Equal Rights, have used service and sacrifice to claim citizenship, and public support for legal recognition of same-sex partnerships has risen markedly, driven partly by the brutal concreteness of war: a partner with no legal status cannot make medical decisions, claim a body, or inherit. Draft legislation on registered partnerships, Bill No. 9103, introduced in the Verkhovna Rada in March 2023 by the MP Inna Sovsun and explicitly motivated by the situation of LGBT service personnel, advanced further than at any point in Ukrainian history, securing the backing of several parliamentary committees, though it remained unadopted as of the period under study (Kyiv Independent, 2025). On the other side, the war’s premium on traditional martial masculinity, and the political deference to religious institutions in wartime, cut against these gains, and LGBTQI+ persons in occupied territories face the imported apparatus of Russian persecution, where the designation of the “LGBT movement” as extremist converts identity into crime. The UN’s global CRSV reporting for 2025 likewise records heightened targeting of LGBTQI+ individuals in conflict settings (UN News, 2026). The Ukrainian case thus compresses into one society the competing trajectories of queer citizenship through military service and queer endangerment through occupation, and which trajectory prevails will be settled in the same post-war politics that will settle the gender order generally.

7. Discussion

Returning to the research questions, the analysis supports the following answers.

On RQ1, the war has reconfigured Ukrainian gender relations in genuinely contradictory directions, and the contradiction is the finding. Women’s agency has expanded where the war economy demanded it, in the military, in volunteer logistics, in heading displaced households and civil society, while contracting where structures lagged, in equipment, in protection from harassment, in labour markets abroad, and at the negotiating table. The pattern matches the historical template of wartime mobilisation followed by post-war retrenchment, and the decisive period for Ukrainian gender relations will therefore be not the war but the demobilisation, when the functional case for inclusion lapses and only the political case remains.

On RQ2, the discrepancies between narrative and record proved the thesis’s most productive terrain. Two anomalies stand out: verified CRSV in this war predominantly targets men, against a global and discursive pattern that is overwhelmingly female; and the war’s largest sex-differentiated policy, the exit ban, escapes gender analysis altogether. Both anomalies are generated by the same protection narrative, which renders female victimhood visible and male victimhood unspeakable, and male obligation natural and female obligation exceptional. The methodological lesson generalises: gender analysis that begins from “women” as its object will systematically miss half of how gender works in war; analysis must begin from the gender order, within which women and men are jointly positioned.

On RQ3, gender operates in the war’s political dynamics at two levels. In Russia it is constitutive: the invasion is partly the external projection of a domestic regime of militarised masculinity and legislated traditionalism, which means that the war’s ideological settlement, whenever it comes, is also a settlement about gender, and a Russia unreconstructed in this respect remains structurally disposed toward militarism. In the peace process gender operates by absence: the exclusion of women from negotiations is not an oversight within an otherwise sound process but evidence of what the process values, and the WPS agenda has so far proven unable to convert normative standing into a seat.

Theoretically, the case both vindicates and disciplines feminist IR. It vindicates Enloe, Sjoberg, Carpenter, and Cockburn in detail; the protection racket, the invisibilisation of male victims, the continuum into the post-war home, all are observable in the record. It disciplines the field by showing the cost of its own occasional slippage from “gender” to “women”: the Ukrainian case cannot be adequately analysed, and Ukrainian survivors of all genders cannot be adequately served, by frameworks that retain that slippage. Finally, a limitation must be restated: the verified record on which parts of this analysis rest is shaped by access asymmetries, and conclusions about occupied territory in particular are provisional by construction. The thesis’s claims are claims about the documented war, in full awareness that the undocumented war is large.

8. Conclusion

This thesis has analysed the gendered structure of the Russia-Ukraine war from 2022 to mid-2026, arguing that gender is at once a register of the war’s costs, a lens that dominant narratives systematically distort, and a component of the war’s causes and eventual resolution. Its contributions are three. Empirically, it synthesises the documentary record on women’s military participation, conflict-related sexual violence, displacement, mobilisation, Russian gender politics, and negotiation exclusion through mid-2026. Analytically, it identifies and explains two consequential anomalies, the male predominance in verified CRSV and the invisibility of the exit ban as gender policy, tracing both to the protection narrative that organises perception of the war. Normatively, it argues that the Women, Peace and Security agenda, as currently practised, is failing its first major test in a European interstate war, both by exclusion from real negotiations and by a conceptual apparatus that omits masculinity and male victimhood.

For policy, three implications follow. Survivor services and transitional justice mechanisms in Ukraine must be designed for survivors of all genders, including the predominantly male population subjected to sexualised torture in detention. Reconstruction and demobilisation planning must treat the care economy, family reunification, and post-war domestic violence as core security questions rather than social afterthoughts. And any negotiation architecture that purports legitimacy should be measured against the participation standard the international community set for itself in 2000, before it sets that standard quietly aside in the one war where the world is watching.

For future research, the agenda is substantial: fieldwork with female veterans through demobilisation; longitudinal study of refugee return decisions; documentation of LGBTQI+ wartime experience, which remains the record’s thinnest seam; and, when access permits, investigation of the occupied territories, where this war’s most important gender history is currently being lived beyond the reach of anyone who could write it down.

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