What do World War II and Russia's war against Ukraine have in common?

The dehumanization of opponents through sexual violence and propaganda.

The Nazis drove Jewish women naked and shaved through the streets, making them targets of public hostility and abuse.

Russian propaganda reports describe Ukrainian women as “Nazi sluts” and “Nazi whores.”

Russia justifies its own war crimes through its own narratives - and with them the sexual violence against women during war.

Marta Havryshko researches how sexual violence is used in war, tactically and strategically.

And how this violence influences the pursuit of equality.

She originally worked as a lecturer at the University of Lviv and fled Ukraine after the Russian attack.

She is currently a visiting lecturer at Clark University in Massachusetts.

In her research, she draws parallels between the Second World War and the Russian war against her homeland.

»In May 2022, hundreds of women in Mariupol will be captured by Russia.

Some of them can be exempted after a year.

“They describe the brutal treatment by Russian soldiers,” she says in the podcast.

»You remember beatings.

They remember forced nudity and how Russian soldiers took photos of naked Ukrainian soldiers.”

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Marta Havryshko, born in 1984, is director of the Babyn Yar Interdisciplinary Studies Institute at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kiev.

She is currently a visiting scholar at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, Massachusetts

Images like these are shared on social media channels for propaganda purposes, including by government agencies, says Havryshko.

To stir up fear of the aggressors.

To humiliate the entire community of victims and publicly disparage its members.

In order to reduce the will to resist.

»We find that women's bodies have become a battlefield in this war.

And sexual violence became an instrument, a weapon of war.

Just like missiles, drones and bombs.

Less expensive, but no less productive and no less damaging to Russian military strategy and war goals.”

In the SPIEGEL foreign podcast Eight Billions, Marta Havryshko talks about the historical and current significance of sexualized violence in wars.

She explains why feminism and emancipation in Ukraine are simultaneously promoted and endangered by the war.

How Russia is specifically fighting this feminism.

And how Russian militarism ensures that its own violence also influences civil society.

This episode will be published on International Women's Day 2024. It is almost an irony of history that this day goes back to the uprising of courageous women in Russia.

In 1917, thousands of women took to the streets to protest against the First World War.

“Peace!” they shouted and “end of autocracy”.

Listen to this episode here: