Russia’s war against Ukraine has not only redrawn geopolitical boundaries but also intensified a crisis of violence at home. Behind the rhetoric of patriotism and “traditional values”, aggression has migrated from war grounds into private life. Women are bearing the brunt of this shift as wartime brutality infiltrates households; legal protections erode and bodily autonomy becomes a matter of state control. What is unfolding is not merely a military or political conflict but a profound social crisis in which militarisation sustains gendered violence.
War dissolves the boundary between public and private aggression. The familiar “boomerang of violence” seen after Afghanistan and Chechnya has returned with the invasion of Ukraine. Soldiers come home traumatised and shaped by a militarised masculinity that normalises dominance and force. Since 2022, Russia has seen its first rise in murders in two decades, particularly in border regions, with many killings occurring within families amid impunity, alcoholism and despair.
Rather than restoring accountability, recent wartime legislation has dismantled it. Amendments adopted in 2024 grant de facto immunity to participants in the “special military operation”. Criminal proceedings can be suspended for mobilised men and terminated if they are later decorated or demobilised. These provisions apply to nearly all violent crimes except sexual abuse of minors, and require neither victim consent nor compensation. In practice, men convicted of murder, rape or domestic abuse can evade punishment if they have served in the war.
This impunity exemplifies what feminist scholars describe as militarised patriarchy: a political order that elevates male aggression as a patriotic virtue while devaluing women’s lives. The Russian courts are increasingly treating combat service as a mitigating factor in domestic violence cases, issuing suspended sentences for severe assaults and praising perpetrators’ “service to the fatherland”. The underlying message is unmistakable: those who fight for the state are not fully accountable for violence in the home.
As gendered violence escalates, the state has shifted focus to demographic anxiety. Declaring 2024 the “Year of the Family”, officials urged women to give birth earlier and deprioritise careers. Reproductive rights have been curtailed through regional abortion restrictions, revoked clinic licences and limits on emergency contraception. Fourteen regions now penalise “childfree propaganda”, and President Putin’s fertility targets for governors have turned reproduction into a metric of state performance. This agenda reinforces militarised patriarchy by recasting women as instruments of demographic recovery, subordinating their autonomy to national priorities. For women already experiencing abuse, often from returning soldiers, these policies intensify vulnerability and strip away critical safeguards.
The war’s gendered impact reaches beyond Russia. In Ukraine, displacement and trauma have also fuelled a sharp rise in domestic abuse, with police and hotline reports increasing by over 40 per cent in early 2022. Yet unlike Russia, Ukraine has ratified the Istanbul Convention, strengthening protection mechanisms for survivors. This contrast underscores that wartime violence is inseparable from governance and accountability: where institutions uphold women’s rights, harm can be mitigated; where they collapse, violence becomes systemic.
This research is conducted in collaboration with the “Till Death Do Us Part: Four Epochs of Violence in Every Family in Russia (FEVER)” project at the University of Helsinki