7 Reasons You Should Never Date a Russian Woman

People in Russia expect women to prioritize motherhood over professional development because of Russia’s low fertility rate. Citing a belief that strenuous jobs pose a threat to women’s safety and reproductive health, the government has barred women from occupations like aircraft repair, construction and firefighting. While the country passed reforms in 2019 to reduce the number of restricted jobs from 456 to 100, they will not come into effect until 2021. However, some of the largest industries, like mining and electric engineering, remain in the barred category. When women—commonly described as “the weaker sex”—do serve in the Russian military, they do not escape traditional gender stereotyping.

• Hence it is important to “decolonize” the discourse and create platforms, such as the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s “She Is an Expert” project, to help achieve true gender parity, which is not about political correctness but about the quality of work and expertise and the visibility thereof.
• Multiple attempts have been made to pass a law on domestic violence, piggybacking on structural opportunities like an election or a general reform and at the same time making full use of informal politics.
• During the two weeks following Putin’s mobilization announcement, 119,000 Russians entered the EU and an independent review of Russia’s Federal Customs Service data for the same period showed 200,000 going to Kazakhstan and another 49,000 entering Georgia.
• There are over 150 crisis centers in Russia, but only a handful are truly active and well-known.
• If done thoughtfully, it could do more than resolve the standoff in Ukraine—it could pave the way for broader cooperation between the US, Russia, and Europe and beyond on climate, disarmament and more.

Many of the problems raised at the conference are systemic and go beyond women’s issues; solving them will require a cultural shift and political transformation. The Russian conservative backlash is shifting attention from the country’s economic decline and growing inequality to status anxieties and is undermining both traditional and intersectional feminist agendas. Some feminist and women’s rights organizations that used to be seen as a normal part of civil society are now ostracized by the general public. While the pursuit of women’s rights should not be reduced to a fight against specific government policies and legislative initiatives, Russia offers an interesting case for exploring the motivations and strategies of activism and social change in an authoritarian regime. In January 2017, the lower house of the Russian legislature decriminalized first time domestic violence. This applies to first offenses which do not cause serious injury, decreasing from a maximum penalty of two years imprisonment to a maximum of fifteen days in police custody.

Russian Women

Since most victims do not report their abuse, most “first-time offenders” are actually long-time abusers. In addition, police officers routinely ignore domestic disturbance calls. When officers do respond, they often refuse to criminally prosecute instead of telling victims to prosecute privately. This is economically unfeasible for many women and effectively places the onus of an entire subgroup of law enforcement on the victim rather than the state.

Manning with women: an overlooked solution to personnel shortages?

This precious thing is a “mysterious Russian soul” (according to the Russian classical writers, загáдочная рýсская душá), family values, personality traits, and a very traditional outlook on life. Female protesters in Russia are particularly vulnerable to the threat of sexual violence, said OVD-Info lawyer Daria Korolenko. The group documented about 200 cases of women threatened with sexual violence, deprived of food or sleep or subjected to other mistreatment while detained over protests between Sept. 21 and 26. Ella Rossman, a researcher at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, attributed the rise in the share of women at protests to fears of some men of conscription and to a growing Russian feminist movement.

ABC News

But a Russian woman can come from different ethnicities and different parts of the country – from Central and Southern Russia… People from all over the world consider Russian women beautiful or at the very least… extremely beautiful. This means that Russian women appeal to people of very different nations and ethnicities. And that’s probably due to Russian women being very ethnically diverse. In 1730 Anna Ivanova revoked the Law of Single Inheritance, as it had been a major point of contestation among the nobility since Peter first announced it in https://fracturedstate.net/asian-women/russian-women/ 1714. After 1731, property rights were expanded to include inheritance in land property. It also gave women greater power over the estates that had been willed to them, or received in their wedding dowry.

However, women of any class could turn infrequently to the ecclesiastical courts to resolve their marital conflicts. In addition to legal barriers to job opportunities, traditional gender roles box women out of professions like politics.

Articles advising men on how to avoid mobilization proliferate in Russian media. “Legal and not so legal lifehacks” include not opening the door when someone knocks, staying off social media, undergoing a surgery, adopting a child as a single father, faking a physical or mental illness, and checking yourself into rehab for drug addiction. This is particularly relevant to people who don’t have the financial resources to just leave. Which might be one reason why Russian authorities often target men from poor and rural regions, as well as those of Muslim and Asian backgrounds. The Washington Post reported that activists in the impoverished far eastern regions of Buryatia and Yakutia believe that the mobilization disproportionately targets ethnic minorities. At the latest count, more than 14,900 Russian people have been detained by security forces and police for protesting, according to OVD-Info, a Russian human rights organization. At a time when we find ourselves in perhaps the most dangerous moment since the Cuban missile crisis, we call on the media in both our countries to stop fueling the flames of war.

To substantiate this recommendation, Human Rights Watch cites an independent study which concludes Russian women are three times as likely to encounter violence at the hands of a family member or loved one than a stranger. Furthermore, Human Rights Watch observed that only 3% of domestic violence cases in Russia go to trial, and notes that the 2017 decriminalization makes it even harder to prosecute abusers. In 1999, there were only four women named as part of the Nezavisimaya gazeta’s monthly ranking of influential Russian politicians, the highest-ranking being Tatyana Dyachenko, Boris Yeltsin’s daughter.

Makoveev noticed that after Vladimir Putin announced a military mobilisation in September, which led to an unprecedented exodus out of the country, many Russians were now choosing to stay in Argentina. In one chat group called Giving Birth in Argentina, on the Russian messaging Telegram app, more than 3,000 members, mostly soon-to-be mums, exchange tips on the finest maternity wards in Buenos Aires or where to best get baby formula. Figures on how many Russian women travel to Argentina specifically to give birth, however, are hard to come by. Russian women moving to Argentina to give birth now pay anywhere from £1,000 to £8,000 to brokers like Pekurova, who offer services that range from arranging translators and helping with the reams of paperwork to organising photoshoots with the newborn baby. Like many other firms in the industry, Pekurov’s company previously offered similar tours to Miami, Florida – once a hotspot for birth tourism. Even prior to the war, Russians could go visa-free to only about 80 countries.