Vladimir Putin (70) has used Women’s Day to award state orders to women. A number of them are part of the war in Ukraine.
March 8 is a big day in Russia, and in the Ekaterina Hall in the Kremlin the president awarded state orders to around twenty women.
– Putin wants the women to be part of the war’s propaganda, says Inna Sangadzhieva of the Helsinki Committee.
Several of the women are directly involved in the war on the Russian side, others live in the annexed areas of Ukraine.
- According to Putin, military nurse Kristina Kim “acted with exceptional dedication to save wounded soldiers and civilians”. The high-ranking officer Tatjana Chuchenko was also honored with a state order.
- According to the same president, the war correspondent Vlada Lugovskaja has shown “striking courage”. Putin paid special tribute to women who work as journalists in the war.
- Putin also paid tribute to women working in high-tech industries that strengthen defense capabilities.
- The president paid special tribute to female doctors in the annexed areas of Ukraine and orders to Ludmila Beletskaja, chief physician in the Luhansk region and Anna Zjeleznaja, deputy head of a maternity/children’s ward in Donetsk. The Minister of Education in the Russian administration of Luhansk, Jelena Sjapurova, was also honored.
- Putin has also reinstated the old honor from the Soviet era – “Mother Heroine”, and two women received it: Olga Strelnikova, mother of 11, and Albina Khajdarshina, mother of 13.
Inna Sangadzhieva is head of department in the Helsinki Committee and is herself Russian. This is how she views Putin’s 8 March commemoration:
– He wants the war to be normalized in the lives of Russians. With this marking, Putin shows that women must also be part of the war’s propaganda.
Sangadzhieva says that March 8 is marked even more in Russia than in Norway, but that Women’s Day has little to do with rights.
– It is primarily symbolic. And with these state orders, Putin draws out Soviet nostalgia, among other things by reintroducing “Mother heroine”. He wants women to produce children in war.
– How is Putin’s relationship with women?
– I feel that he has little respect for women. With the commemoration on March 8, he will show that he is there for the women, but in my opinion, Putin has a poor view of women. He looks down on women very much. He just pretends to care, says Sangadzhieva.
– He constantly talks about the traditional role of women and the role of women in the Russian state. At the same time, Putin points to what he believes to be negative developments in women’s and family roles in Western countries.
Inna Sangadzhieva points out that Putin has several times had trouble in his relationship with women – both wives and mothers from the Kursk accident, the mothers from the Beslan terror and most recently the meeting with the women behind the mobilized soldiers before Christmas 2022. Sangadzhieva has previously called this meeting a bluff.
One year ago, on March 8, 2022, Putin promised that there would be no mobilization. It was nevertheless the autumn of 2022, and many women have reacted strongly to the fact that their beloved sons, husbands and brothers have been sent to war without much preparation.
Other women who were honored on Wednesday included a high-ranking policewoman and one of the managers of the writer Lev Tolstoy’s estate “Jasnaya Polyana”.
