Since the 2022 full-scale invasion, the number of women in the Ukrainian military has increased by 40% to approximately 100,000. The much bigger Russian military contains only around 40,000 women, and the number of those deployed in Ukraine was just 1,100 in March 2023, according to then Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Why are there so few women in the Russian military, and even fewer on the frontline?
Given Putin’s emphasis on “traditional” family values and machismo, the shortfall is perhaps not surprising. While women are permitted to join Russia’s armed forces, they are currently excluded from 450 roles, many at the frontline, because it is claimed strenuous activity could affect their reproductive capabilities.
The reluctance to send women into combat also stems from a complicated legacy of the Soviet era, when women had an inconsistent role in military affairs.
By the end of World War II, an estimated 800,000 Soviet women (which of course included Ukrainians and other minorities) were enlisted in the armed forces. They were deployed in combat positions, as snipers, pilots, and tank drivers. Partisans, who sabotaged German forces and fought behind enemy lines, also included women in their ranks.
Moscow officially started enlisting women in 1942 to make up for the shortage of male troops in the brutal early years of war.
No other formal military force allowed women into combat, but gender equality was a central tenet of Soviet ideology, so it was a logical step. A patriarchal system nonetheless remained, and one that strongly associated masculinity with soldiering.
This made the female soldier a controversial figure, representing women’s equality under socialism but endangering the Soviet gender order.
During World War II, state-controlled Soviet newspapers highlighted the contentious nature of women’s combat service and offered different explanations to different audiences.
Newspapers for general and male readers largely neglected tales of women in combat, while women’s magazines celebrated their achievements at the front. The former depicted soldiering as a male occupation, while the latter demonstrated that women could participate as equals to men.
Pravda, the main newspaper of the Communist Party, and the Red Army newspaper Krasnaia Zvezda rarely published articles about women in combat. Famous examples, like Ukrainian-born sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, sometimes received mention, but journalists used vague language around women’s kills, concealing their violence on the frontline.
More often, these newspapers followed scripts suited for male audiences, such as women as nurses, working on the home front, and as victims of German brutality.
Meanwhile, women’s magazines, like Rabotnitsa and Krestianka, depicted women as successful combatants. Covers and stories showed women at the front, holding rifles and charging into battle. Women had their battlefield exploits shared, including the number and details of enemies killed (Pavlichenko killed 309).
And the magazines did not minimize women’s service to make it more palatable for male readers. Instead, they encouraged women to enlist and replicate the behavior modeled by their comrades.
The Komsomol, the youth league of the Communist Party, similarly promoted women’s combat service in its newspaper. The organization had encouraged women’s participation in paramilitary organizations in the 1930s and directed female military recruitment.
Soviet media was strictly controlled, particularly under Joseph Stalin, yet the government allowed a range of opinions on female soldiers.
They offered two readings of womanhood: one that aligned with soldierhood (what historian Anna Krylova terms a “non-oppositional, but binary” concept of gender) and another that contrasted with it. Ultimately, the government promoted the latter when the war was over.
After victory in 1945, the Soviet Union barred women from combat and military academies, redefining warfare as a masculine pursuit.
The problem was that women’s involvement in combat had demonstrated that they could act as soldiers in the same way as men, thereby questioning Soviet ideas of masculinity. The USSR’s military didn’t allow women back into combat roles for the rest of its existence.
This legacy of prohibition continues to impact Russia, where, even after 80 years, women’s reproductive capabilities are prized more than their military skills. The number of women in the Russian military lags behind other countries in part because of Putin’s conservative gender policies, but also because it follows the reactionary post-war Soviet position.
The Ukrainian military has stepped away from that Soviet legacy and is more willing to enlist women. And it’s not just a result of desperation and manpower shortages after the full-scale invasion. There’s also an expectation that women can engage in warfare, so they are allowed to do so.
The Russian experience shows how women’s relationship to the military can affect cultural understandings of both womanhood and manhood, which can then carry long-lasting implications.
Ukrainian women’s involvement in the fighting will impact their place in society after the war and is likely to be a defining feature of their country’s reconstruction and rebirth.
Victoria Paige is a PhD Candidate in History at Ohio State University. Her research examines ideas of gender during the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
