Between Women’s Rights and Repressive Laws: The Case of Ksenia Goryacheva

On September 18, 2026, Russians began casting ballots in a three-day vote for a new State Duma, the lower house of parliament. Ksenia Goryacheva ran for the New People party [editor’s note: founded in 2020, the party entered the Duma in 2021; it presents itself as a liberal, pro-business alternative but is widely regarded as part of the Kremlin-sanctioned “systemic” opposition], heading its candidate list in four regions of central Russia: Tula, Kaluga, Smolensk, and Tver. The official tally of these “elections” left her without a seat in the incoming Duma, yet she remains a prominent presence on Russia’s political stage. Goryacheva made women’s rights the centerpiece of her campaign, championing protection for survivors of domestic violence and stalking, reproductive freedom, guaranteed child support, equal pay, and a raft of other measures to support women.  

Yet at the same time, Goryacheva and her party routinely back repressive legislation in the State Duma — laws that have been weaponized in recent years to target independent journalists, human rights groups, queer people, activists, and migrant women. Unsurprisingly, Goryacheva’s campaign website completely ignores this aspect of her parliamentary record.

Born in the Tyumen region of western Siberia, Goryacheva graduated from the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics and spent several years working for Captains, an educational program created by businessman Alexey Nechayev, who would go on to found the New People party. In 2021, she became head of the party’s St. Petersburg branch, won a seat in the State Duma on the party list, and was named first deputy chair of its Committee on Science and Higher Education.

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A Parliamentary Mandate in the Service of Women

In January 2026, Moscow police detained 21-year-old Ayna Mankieva, who had fled Ingushetia to escape physical and sexual abuse [editor’s note: Ingushetia is a small, predominantly Muslim republic in Russia’s North Caucasus, bordering Chechnya; human rights groups regularly document cases of women who flee abuse there being tracked down and forcibly returned to their families, often with police help]. Her mother had accused her of stealing 20,000 rubles, and she was at risk of being handed over to law enforcement in Ingushetia. Lawyers and human rights defenders secured her release from the police station, and that same day Goryacheva offered to take her on as an unpaid assistant. Although the role carries no legal immunity, the police are obliged to notify a lawmaker if one of their assistants is detained. Three weeks later, the case was dropped, with investigators concluding that no crime had been committed.

“When we tell the cops they can’t do that, it doesn’t count for much. A lawmaker saying the same thing carries a lot more weight with them,” explains Yekaterina Neroznikova of Marem, a human rights group that helps women from the North Caucasus. Lawyers, journalists, and public advocates all worked on Ayna’s case, so it would be rash to credit the outcome to a single job offer from a lawmaker. Still, as a sitting lawmaker, Goryacheva can raise women’s issues publicly without being tarred with the labels the state has already pinned on exiled women and women branded “foreign agents.” According to Neroznikova, an independent activist with a blog of 20,000 followers would very likely find herself persecuted in no time for making the same statements.

In the spring of 2026, Goryacheva joined the effort to find Belkisa Mintsayeva, who had gone to Chechnya to see her daughters and then disappeared. The lawmaker demanded that prosecutors look into the actions of the local police. At the end of May, Chechen television showed Mintsayeva at her ex-husband’s house. In the video, she says she is alive and well, but human rights defenders still could not reach her directly and doubted that the video had been recorded voluntarily. While inquiries have at least confirmed that she is alive, whether she is free is impossible to tell from the footage.

In June 2025, following a wave of street harassment in Moscow, Goryacheva urged Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Investigative Committee, to look into pickup blogger Alex Lesley. A criminal case for incitement to rape was opened that same evening. Later, Goryacheva passed on to law enforcement materials that journalists and activists had gathered on other misogynistic bloggers and online communities.

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Goryacheva’s Program and Initiatives

In spring 2026, Goryacheva launched the Manifesto of the Women of Russia under the ambitious slogan “We Are Russia.” The document sets out ten demands, which it calls “precepts.” The first says that publicly insulting a woman on screen, from a podium, or on a blog should be treated as a criminal offense. The others cover protection from domestic violence and stalking, equal pay, accessible healthcare, a state child support fund, and freedom of reproductive choice. Under each precept, Russian women and men could suggest ways to improve the Manifesto.

By the end of August, Goryacheva’s team reported 695,575 signatures. However, there is no way to verify this figure.

Soon afterward, Goryacheva explained that the work doesn’t end with lawmaking, because people’s attitudes need to change too. When she was starting out, she said, her Duma colleagues called the women’s agenda “a bit dangerous” and advised her to “do some real work” instead.

Another of Goryacheva’s initiatives, the Keyword project, is a network of cafés, pharmacies, and other establishments where a woman who is being harassed or stalked can say a code phrase, take refuge in a staff-only room, and call for help. Three hundred venues joined in the first month. The project’s website now lists 546 locations in 111 cities and two confirmed cases in which someone was helped.

A companion project, Stalkingu.Net (roughly, “No to Stalking”), offers support to women who are being stalked. A woman fills out a form, and one of the project’s lawyers advises her and stays in touch. If the police fail to act, New People lawmakers step in with an official inquiry, which obliges the authorities to investigate and give a reasoned response. According to the counter on the website, the platform has received more than 1,300 requests for help and sent around 100 inquiries, and more than ten criminal cases have been opened. On her Telegram channel, Goryacheva cites even higher figures: 1,600 people who have reached out and more than 200 inquiries.

According to Goryacheva, a state child support fund was among the most common proposals women left through the Manifesto’s feedback form. On June 30, Goryacheva and her fellow New People lawmakers Sardana Avksentyeva and Vladislav Davankov sent a bill to the government for review. Under the proposal, if a parent fails to pay child support or pays only part of it, the fund would cover the missing amount for the family and then collect the debt from the parent who failed to pay.

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What Became of the Bills

Since 2023, Goryacheva, Davankov, and Avksentyeva have tried several times to pass an anti-stalking law. The first bill would have let courts bar a stalker from approaching or contacting the victim, but a Duma committee gave it a negative review. The 2024 version excluded spouses and unmarried partners living together, leaving victims of domestic violence without protection. The government asked for the wording to be clarified, while the relevant committee pointed to the absence of the government’s mandatory opinion. Bills introduced in December 2025 and February 2026 also failed to reach a first reading. In July, the authors sent a revised text to the government once again.

“You could call the anti-stalking law they proposed imperfect. It doesn’t account for a lot of aspects of the personal and family relationships between the victim and the stalker,” says Albina, a member of the Alliance of Women’s Initiatives of Russia. “But in my view, it’s better than nothing.”

After yet another failed attempt to lobby for the anti-stalking bill, Goryacheva turned to a feminist organization for advice, according to an anonymous member based in Russia. The activists suggested she get the government’s review in advance. They also told her plainly that “nothing can be achieved unless you go beyond the usual limits.” “What happened next suggests Ksenia may have listened to us: the new bill was sent for review right away, and on top of that they drew up a whole manifesto [the Manifesto of the Women of Russia] and started collecting a million signatures to show mass democratic demand for change,” she told Posle.Media.

On domestic violence, Goryacheva proposed in June to bring back criminal liability for a first instance of battery against a family member. Currently, if no harm to health is established, such an incident is treated as an administrative offense.

In the end, even Nina Ostanina of the Communist Party, who had first said the amendment would make men afraid to marry, called the decriminalization of battery a mistake just four days later and supported restoring criminal liability.

Mari Davtyan, a lawyer who helped draft the 2016 domestic violence bill, called the amendment necessary. It would simply restore a provision that was in force after the 2016 amendments, she explained, before lawmakers scrapped it in 2017 in the name of protecting the traditional family. Davtyan does, however, caution against the grand label some media gave the initiative: “the domestic violence law.” The term is misleading, she says, because a criminal provision on its own is not a comprehensive law on preventing domestic violence. Such a law would need a system of protective orders, procedures for cooperation between agencies, police training, assistance and social support for victims, and other infrastructure.

“Anything more substantial was blocked immediately, so Kseniya changed tactics. She’s trying to pass a whole bunch of small laws, making targeted amendments here and there,” explains an anonymous feminist activist in Russia. In her view, a comprehensive bill has no chance right now, and Goryacheva understands this.

The domestic battery amendment submitted in June is still awaiting the government’s review. On August 28, Goryacheva wrote that the deadline for a response had passed and appealed to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin again.

Other activists have also tried to lobby for a law on preventing domestic violence. In April 2025, lawyer Polina Burlakova posted a petition on the Russian Public Initiative portal calling for a law against domestic violence. It gathered 100,000 votes and was then passed to an expert group under the government. Goryacheva publicly supported it.

The experts agreed that protective orders were needed and acknowledged that criminal liability for battery has preventive value, but recommended only that “discussions continue.” They rejected the demand to ban forcibly returning women who have fled violence to their homes, citing existing rules. The case of 18-year-old Ayshat Magomedova shows how those rules work in practice: after her injuries were documented, an investigator drove her back to the home where she had been beaten.

The petition has gone nowhere since autumn 2025. In July, feminists in six cities in the Urals took to the streets demanding that it finally be considered.

“We’ve been allowed to speak, but not to act,” says Yevlampiya, a feminist activist and researcher who works on reproductive justice.

By all appearances, the problem really isn’t how persuasive Goryacheva and other activists are. Sources cited by Verstka claim the authorities promised the Patriarch and other Russian Orthodox Church figures that they would not pass a federal domestic violence law, while still allowing individual lawmakers to raise the subject publicly. The DumaBingo project counted six such initiatives introduced in the Duma over the entire eighth convocation, five of them from New People and Goryacheva; the rest were blocked at an earlier stage, by the government or the relevant committee.

“There are topics the authorities consider safe, so they let alternative parties speak out on them. Stalking, for example: New People, the LDPR, and A Just Russia have all proposed bills on it. Of course, the Duma has no intention of passing them,” says the anonymous source in Russia. In her words, “what we’re dealing with is a pro-war political force firmly embedded in the system, and passing the laws that are needed has apparently been blocked at the very top.”

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Goryacheva’s Antithesis: The Church’s Favorite

Another candidate in the same Duma election also appeals to women, and things have gone much better for her. The United Russia party put forward Natalya Moskvitina, Russia’s best-known anti-abortion activist, founder of the pro-life foundation Women for Life, and a presenter on the Orthodox TV channel Spas.

Moskvitina sees female greed as the main cause of Russia’s demographic problems. “One priest has put it well. They don’t have children because they’re greedy. Spot on. Is a baby really going to eat us out of house and home with a bowl of soup or whatever?” she said in January at the Back to the Future conference. In her view, women should give birth even when the pregnancy is the result of rape.

As a result of Moskvitina’s work, 32 Russian regions passed laws between 2023 and 2026 banning “inducing” women to have abortions. In summer 2026, the Vologda regional legislature proposed a federal bill, but for now the Federation Council has rejected it, citing vague wording and pointing to the regional laws already in force.

Moskvitina ran for the Duma from the Vologda region with the backing of Governor Georgiy Filimonov. The region has become one of the main testing grounds for anti-abortion policy. Private clinics there have stopped performing abortions, and doctors receive bonuses if a patient decides to keep the pregnancy after a consultation. In 2025, prosecutors also uncovered cases of women being unlawfully refused abortions. Within a year, the number of abortions in the region fell by 81.6%.

Goryacheva’s social media channels have between 66,000 and 167,000 followers, whereas Moskvitina and her foundation reach only a few thousand. And while Goryacheva’s Manifesto gathered more than 700,000 signatures between May and September, Moskvitina and Women for Life keep a different kind of tally: a counter of babies saved from abortion, which stands at 15,180 over ten years.

Moskvitina has disabled comments on her Telegram channel and switched off negative reactions after the Alliance of Women’s Initiatives of Russia launched a campaign against her candidacy this summer. Evidently, she is not prepared to engage in public debate or respond to criticism, whereas Goryacheva actively answers objections from potential voters right there on social media.

Moskvitina has the ruling party and the Russian Orthodox Church behind her. She founded Women for Life together with Boris Korchevnikov, general director of the Orthodox TV channel Spas. The foundation presented Patriarch Kirill with its own “Stay Human” award, and the Patriarch received a delegation from the foundation in person. The state supports Women for Life as well. According to DOXA, the project won a presidential grant for seminars for maternity hospital staff “aimed at preserving the child’s life” and received money from the Moscow mayor’s fund. Despite the state funding, Women for Life also asks for donations.

Set against Moskvitina, Goryacheva looks like someone trying to squeeze the most out of the very narrow limits the dictatorship allows. While Moskvitina enjoys party support as she lobbies for anti-abortion measures and promotes a patriarchal role for women in the family, Goryacheva is trying to shift legal and social norms in favor of victims of violence. Even with all the caveats, the difference is significant. How tight her limits really are, and whether they are always what drives her decisions, is best seen in the roll-call votes.

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How the Women’s Rights Advocate Votes

On February 15, 2022, nine days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Duma asked Putin to recognize the independence of the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. There were two versions of the appeal. Goryacheva and her faction voted against the Communist Party’s version, which would have sent the appeal straight to the president, and backed United Russia’s more cautious version, which called for consultations with the Foreign Ministry. A week later, after the republics had been recognized, lawmakers ratified friendship treaties with them, and Goryacheva voted for both. It was for these votes that she was sanctioned by the European Union and the United Kingdom.

On June 7, 2022, she backed two laws that freed Russian courts from enforcing rulings of the European Court of Human Rights, where Russians had until then been able to bring complaints against their own state. In July, she voted for the article on “confidential cooperation” with foreigners, under which people can be jailed for contacts with a foreign organization. On September 20, the day before mobilization was announced, she voted for amendments introducing penalties for desertion and voluntary surrender. In April 2023, she voted for electronic draft summonses, which count as delivered even if the person has never logged in to Gosuslugi, the state services portal, and immediately bar them from leaving the country. No vote of hers is recorded on the law against “fake news” about the army.

Did Goryacheva try to argue for an alternative position when repressive laws were being debated and voted on? Yes. In fall 2022, she criticized the broad wording of the law on “LGBT propaganda,” warning of rising rates of depression and suicide and of the consequences for culture and business. “Non-traditional sexual relations are relations between consenting adults with full legal capacity,” she wrote, objecting to their being equated with pedophilia. At the same time, she agreed that the state should support “a positive image of the traditional family” through legislation.

None of Goryacheva’s amendments passed. Even so, on November 24 she voted for the final version of the law, which extended the ban on “LGBT propaganda” to people of all ages. Lawmakers set out the fines in a separate law, and there is no vote from Goryacheva on that one.

The situation regarding the ‘foreign agents’ legislation was similar. In June 2022, Goryacheva quipped from the Duma rostrum that even the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, with all his work trips abroad, would have counted as being under “foreign influence.” She proposed that the status be assigned by a court, that the reasons for adding someone to the registry be explained, and that lawyers, notaries, and scientific organizations be exempted from the law. Her amendments were rejected. In June and November, she abstained in the votes on the law itself and on additional restrictions. When political scientist Alexander Kynev was added to the registry in February 2026, she wrote that it was “simply a disgrace” in her Telegram channel and called him a Russian patriot.

On most other repressive laws, Goryacheva’s voting record is blank. She called the ban on “childfree propaganda” harmful and, together with a colleague, proposed amendments with exceptions, which the committee rejected. Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin urged her faction to vote in favor; the law passed with 403 votes, and Goryacheva’s is not among them. The same happened with the confiscation of property for “fake news.” She voted against it at the first reading in January 2024; a week later, at the final reading, her vote had vanished from the record. There is likewise no signature or vote from her on the ban on gender transition.

It’s worth noting that a blank line in the record means only that the lawmaker did not press any of the three buttons. The record doesn’t say why. In the final tally, such a vote simply isn’t counted.

But Goryacheva did vote for another repressive law. On July 22, 2026, the Duma passed what human rights defenders call the “civil death” law. Russians who have left the country and face politically motivated charges can now have their bank accounts and Gosuslugi accounts blocked and be refused consular services. Goryacheva voted for both parts of the package (bills No. 1095029-8 and 1095042-8).

For Yevlampiya, a feminist activist who has left Russia, this decision outweighs many of Goryacheva’s initiatives to protect women. “Even if I’m doing nothing and the state decides to kill me, I will always remember that when she had to choose between standing up for citizens’ rights and keeping her seat, she chose to shoot me in the head,” she says.

Albina from the Alliance offers her reading of Goryacheva’s voting logic: “Either you support all of it and get some chance at the tiniest displays of opposition, or you’re not in the Duma at all.” She also brings up the law banning the promotion of childfree lifestyles. According to her, New People initially promised publicly that they would not vote for it; then Volodin spoke, and in the end they voted yes.

Goryacheva rarely votes against a bill, but when she does, her actions match her words. In July 2025, she did not back fines for deliberately searching for “extremist materials.” In February 2026, she mocked proposals on her channel to bring back prior censorship and enshrine chastity in law: “Culture thrives where there is competition, freedom, and talent.” That same month, she voted against a law that allowed the FSB to order operators to cut off subscribers’ internet and mobile service without a court order.

This suggests that Goryacheva does have some room for personal choice after all. That makes it all the more striking that she supported a ban on admitting migrant children to schools unless they pass a Russian-language exam, and had even proposed the measure publicly herself before the bill appeared. She also voted to expand criminal liability for participating in the activities of “undesirable organizations.”

Posle.Media wrote about discrimination against migrant children in more detail in “Xenophobia and School.”

A few months later, Goryacheva married Danil Makhnitskiy, co-founder of the Society.Future movement. According to the Sova Center, fighting “illegal immigration” has become one of the movement’s priorities. It advocates restricting migration from Central Asia and the South Caucasus and introducing a visa regime.

It would be odd to attribute her husband’s views to Goryacheva. However, the anonymous activist in Russia we spoke to sees a link between the lawmaker’s own anti-migrant initiative and her closeness to this circle: “Ksenia shrewdly keeps some of her views hidden from her target audience, for instance the fact that she is presumably a Russian nationalist.”

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What Feminist Activists Inside Russia Think of Goryacheva

The anonymous activist in Russia has mixed feelings about Goryacheva. On the one hand, the party “was created and allowed into power with the approval of the Kremlin administration” and from the start gathered people of loosely liberal views “in a safe way.” On the other hand, she says, “you get the feeling that she isn’t engaged in cynical hypocrisy after all, and genuinely believes both that things need to improve for women in Russia and that this can supposedly be done now through reformist and democratic means.”

She considers criticism of Goryacheva’s domestic violence bill to be “missing the mark,” since Ksenia is well aware of its limitations.

She finds it disarming “that we probably haven’t heard such formally correct pro-feminist words from high political platforms since the ’90s.” Even so, she struggles to fully agree with Goryacheva’s course. In her view, it’s important to remember that “lies, war, and repression are also hiding” behind this part of the political system.

Albina from the Alliance views the lawmaker’s work positively: “It’s nice when one of the women in the Duma speaks publicly about women’s rights.” Even though she understands that a law on preventing domestic violence won’t be passed now, she believes it’s essential to keep talking about it. “I wouldn’t want to be telling some young women thirty, forty, fifty years from now that we gave up back then, realized the law wouldn’t pass, and stopped doing anything.” Besides, she goes on, if Goryacheva’s work “saves lives, even of ten women, that will already be wonderful.”

For her part, Albina sees no obstacles to working with Goryacheva’s team. “If you’re not collaborating specifically on drafting discriminatory laws, if you’re not creating something that will make people’s lives harder, then I don’t see any problem with it. If they came to me, I would definitely help.”

Russian activists are, of course, aware that such cooperation carries risks for Goryacheva too. “A lawmaker who works with feminists could get hit the way Oksana Pushkina once did, when pro-government media ran a campaign accusing her of being funded from abroad,” Albina explains.

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Views from Feminists in Forced Exile

“Her goal is political, not human rights work,” says Darya Serenko, a coordinator of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance, who sees “Women’s Voice” first and foremost as a well-thought-out election campaign. Before elections, New People churn out initiatives “almost every week,” she says, but doing this kind of work systematically is impossible in today’s Russia: “you have to do it cosmetically, hoping that at least something will come of it.”

Serenko describes New People’s existence as an endless game of playing along. “They grumble a bit, take part in a process that means nothing in the big picture but looks like an alternative, and go home satisfied, supposedly heard and represented.” Sometimes, she notes, the authorities may “toss New People some little bone from the master’s table, so they have something to show voters as a win”; but if they try to go further, they are reminded of the rules of the game.

In the campaign to bring back criminal liability for domestic battery, Serenko observes, the history of the issue itself has somehow disappeared. Neither Goryacheva nor her team publicly mentions the twenty-five years of struggle, the bills introduced and rejected, or the titanic work of Mari Davtyan’s team. “For elections and ratings, it’s good. For women, probably good too, but less so.”

Serenko herself would not work with New People; she would feel the party was using her reputation to whitewash itself. She is less categorical, though, about activists inside Russia working with Goryacheva: “Zero condemnation, one hundred percent understanding. Everyone claws out their own way to keep working.” Serenko does believe Goryacheva is sincere, and puts this down to her own experience as a “girl from the system” who knows how strong the belief can be that you can change something from the inside.

“It looks like an attempt to have it both ways,” Yevlampiya says of Goryacheva. To her, Goryacheva’s party is like “relatives who see a husband beating his wife and go on socializing with him as if nothing were happening.” It amounts to saying on the one hand that women must not be beaten and, on the other, going along with mass beatings and killing, that is, the war in Ukraine, she explains. Yevlampiya does think that helping individual women is genuinely important, but the house has been on fire for a long time, and the state, in her words, sees a woman only as a function: “incubator, educator, uncomplainer.”

“We don’t have the luxury of simply dividing people into good and bad,” says Neroznikova of Marem. The group’s own social media had published critical posts about Goryacheva, and then the Marem team turned to her for help. “We need our own agents of influence.” Compared with many of the people her team has to deal with, she adds, Goryacheva is “a real little angel.” “As long as Goryacheva can play this role, it’s useful to us. She gains more for herself than we gain from her being there. But we gain a little too.”

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What Goryacheva’s Story Tells Us About Russian Politics Today

Goryacheva’s women-focused agenda helps the Duma look livelier and more tolerant than it really is, and gives New People a way to talk once again to the liberal audience it keeps disappointing on the Duma floor. According to Vedomosti’s calculations, between October 2021 and February 2026 the faction voted yes 96.3% of the time and no twice. United Russia voted yes 99.3% of the time.

“Any engagement with the electoral machinery is just a way of protesting publicly, more or less legally,” says Serenko. Everything else in Russia is banned, repressed, and censored, “and people look for any loophole, any opening, any tiny crack to say that they disagree, that they’re against the war, against the dictatorship.”

Throughout the campaign, Goryacheva avoided mentioning Moskvitina, the pro-life Duma candidate. Serenko noted that Goryacheva’s followers had asked her to respond to Moskvitina’s nomination or to support the Alliance of Women’s Initiatives of Russia’s campaign, but got no reply.

On August 30, however, Goryacheva broke her silence. In Yekaterinburg, she recorded a video holding a United Russia campaign booklet titled “Protection, Love, and Respect for Women.” The booklet had a print run of 150,000, and in Yekaterinburg campaigners handed it out only to women (one campaigner was told outright not to give it to men). The centerfold lists nine points, the first of which begins with respect for women.

Addressing her audience, Goryacheva says: “You can see for yourselves how now, after all the big work we’ve done together on the Manifesto... all the parties have suddenly become champions of women and are trying to jump on this agenda, proposing things that others proposed for them long ago instead of joining the ideas that were already there.” At the same time, she says, they keep “nominating women candidates who restrict women’s rights, who come with a very questionable record,” and here she names Moskvitina. Don’t fall for campaign booklets, the lawmaker advises; look at who has been doing what all these years.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta suggests that the parliamentary parties’ dispute over women’s rights helped United Russia reach an audience that had already been primed. Yet United Russia’s People’s Program has no separate section on women’s rights.

It isn’t yet clear what women get out of this kind of competition inside a dictatorship at war, Yevlampiya admits: “The parties are embracing the gender agenda, but it is unclear what to do with this political liability, given that a law on combating domestic violence is still not being passed.”

By the time of the 2026 election, the battery bill had been sitting with the government for nearly three months, and the first draft of a domestic violence law, which Russia has never passed, was about to turn thirty-two. It might seem that, under Russia’s dictatorship, the lesser of two evils among the women vying to represent women’s interests in the Duma is obvious. For all the caveats, Goryacheva is already helping specific women and keeps trying to lobby for laws that protect victims of violence. Set against Moskvitina, that is enough to make the choice look clear. Even so, according to the results of the “elections,” Goryacheva did not win a seat in the new, ninth Duma. And Goryacheva herself makes compromises with the system that restricts the rights of other women: those who openly demand an end to the war and oppose Putin’s dictatorship. Time will tell whether that price is fair.

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