Putin's War Against Women

In the first novel by Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen, she addressed the sexualized violence inflicted on women in Estonia during the Soviet occupation. She has now written the essay “Putin’s War Against Women,” which discusses the sexual crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine. Iris Radisch spoke with Oksanen in Helsinki and reports on it for ZEIT ONLINE.

Oksanen’s essay discusses “the universal sexual violence” that has been perpetrated with impunity by Russian soldiers for generations. “Only after the horrors of Bucha,” Sofi Oksanen states, “did the strategic significance of sexual violence become evident.” Until then, sexual violence was the war crime that received the least attention and was historically underestimated. It was dismissed as a regrettable collateral damage of war, something that has been inherently linked to male drives since mythical times.

For the victims of sexual war crimes, there are no memorials or days of remembrance. In the post-war period, addressing the history of the estimated two million women whose bodies became battlegrounds for the Soviet army and who passed their untreated trauma on to the next generation hardly played a role. Oksanen says there simply was no language for what had happened to these women. Consequently, their experiences never became part of the Western memory. Sexual violence is a weapon of war. It destroys women, it destroys families. It humiliates and shames. Yet, it has never become a historical memory for all of Europe—until today.

Oksanen calls for a tribunal to investigate the sexual crimes—and other war crimes—committed in Ukraine.

The worst forms of sexual violence were also perpetrated by Hamas terrorists against women in Israel. “Hamas’s hatred of women: Rape and murder as a marketing strategy,” noted SZ on October 30, 2023. Hamas deliberately dehumanizes women—primarily to “generate positive resonance with a specific audience.” The impact shows “how intense the hatred of (autonomous) women still is in the world.”

Sara Fremberg from medica mondiale reported a few months ago on LinkedIn: “The federal government wants to expand German international criminal law. The definitions of war crimes and crimes against humanity will be adjusted so that offenses like sexual assaults, sexual slavery, and forced abortions can be prosecuted specifically.”