Russian media ‘silencing’ mothers’ resistance to war – report

Dr Jenny Mathers, Department of International Politics

Russia state media is actively silencing mothers’ opposition to the war in Ukraine, according to a new study.

The research by Jenny Mathers from Aberystwyth University and the University of Aberdeen’s Nataliya Danilova analysed almost 600 news articles published in state controlled and independent media outlets during the first 12 months of Russia’s mass invasion of Ukraine.

The review found that stories about women in military families were marginalised across all of them, with their objections to the war either overlooked or ridiculed.

The academics’ work shows the role of female protestors was often hidden using the words ‘people’ and ‘citizen’ - consistent with Russian state’s efforts to downplay women’s objections to the war.

Other coverage contrasted the wisdom of the masculine, repressive state with the naivety of women, especially young mothers.

Since the mid-2010s, Russia has steadily introduced legislation that has imposed control over media at a level unseen since the Soviet times, including laws that require any person or organisation receiving support from outside of the country to register as a ‘foreign agent’ or ‘undesirable organisation’.

Since 2021, administrative and criminal sentences have been imposed for spreading ‘fake news’ and the ‘discreditation of the Russian armed forces’.

According to the findings published in the journal ‘Cooperation & Conflict’, this treatment of women from military families was most evident in the reporting on large-scale protests following the mobilisation of 300,000 reservists in September 2022.

Many independent sources reported that the demonstrators were predominantly or exclusively women with familial ties to soldiers, but that information was largely absent from reports on the protests in state-controlled newspapers, which depicted the women as unworldly and easily misled.

Dr Jenny Mathers, from the Department of International Politics, at Aberystwyth University:

“Our research shows that the Russian state actively silences women’s concerns and losses and uses other tactics to erase military families’ antagonistic relationship with the state. Although many observers have commented on the strength of Putin’s militarism, our analysis exposes the regime’s acute uneasiness over protest by women in military families. These women’s public defiance is obscured, and their losses are appropriated or overridden with reports on the state’s presumed generosity, for example in providing benefits to the families of soldiers killed in the fighting in Ukraine.

“Even when the presence of women at anti-mobilisation demonstrations was acknowledged, their agency as protestors was denied. Instead, women-led dissent was reframed as reflecting their ignorance in matters of war.

“We read the silencing and ridiculing of women not only as a sign of Russia’s state propaganda but also as a manifestation of its acute anxiety over women’s protest at its war-making. To silence and appropriate women’s self-organising, state-controlled newspapers did not report on the statements or actions of organisations created by the wives and mothers of soldiers. Instead, reporting focused on new state-sponsored organisations, that disguise themselves as grassroots movements.”

AU26725

Share