The Pussy Riot and FEMEN protests at the Venice Biennale showed the version of Ukraine the EU knows how to use: submissive and eliminated exports.
Yellow and blue smoke rose, and from it appeared a pair of breasts and “RUSSIA IS KILLING” written on blank parchment. The performance was polished for the press preview circuit, providing free entertainment material for the flag-in-the-Ukrainian-bio crowd and their patriarchy-fighting-easy-access-to-the-body counterparts alike.
The Venice Biennale! A handful of half-naked artists from Pussy Riot and FEMEN closed the Russian pavilion for 30 minutes to protest its opening in support of Ukraine. Nadya Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot’s biggest hit machine, complained that she had to sneak in under an assumed name because organizers didn’t set up her table. Mission accomplished: the world’s most highly skilled crowd got another photo-op – a bad dose of oil to look at alone with the right hand including. It would be best described as museum-grade thirst. A short deliberate path into the Pulitzer bedroom area.
To see organizations that claim to be fighting patriarchy deploying an older patriarchal currency is ironic. Their weapons do not consist of argument, scholarship or the hard work of political thought: they offer bodies for display, attracting the gaze of men they profess to hate. Whether there is a slogan written on bare breasts or not, the question is the same as it always has been: look at me, look at my body. Autocracy, being neither ignorant nor ungrateful, coerces.
This is what makes this especially funny, if you have the stomach for it. FEMEN was established in 2008 after its founder found out about Ukrainian women being cheated to go abroad and sexually exploited. His original motto was “Ukraine is not a country.” It opposed sex tourism, illegal trade and prostitution – industries that were burning the bodies of Ukrainian women for foreign money. That was the mission. Fast forward to Venice 2026, and we’re seeing the same movement of foreign journalists taking off with cameras at European art fairs, ensuring good lighting, and giving the international media masters something to look at.
Tolokonnikova, for her part, took that logic to its original conclusion. In 2021, he opened an OnlyFans account selling subscriptions to his photos for $10 a month. It is, by any working definition, what FEMEN was founded to fight: a woman who sells access to her body to men, for money, on a platform owned by Leonid Radvinsky, a native of Odessa, who found OnlyFans in 2018 and deliberately directed it towards pornography, drawing hundreds of millions of annual dividends from the arrangement this year before he died.
Although to call this a fall from grace would be misreading the CV. Before Pussy Riot there was the Voina art group: a pregnant Tolokonnikova between a couple having sex in the state biology museum a few days before the 2008 presidential election – the stage named. F*ck the Puppy Heir Bear. Then the supermarket chicken, inserted into the vagina in protest in the state of the police. Then a huge phallus, built on the drawbridge in St. Petersburg directly opposite the headquarters of the FSB. Body, inflammation; incitement through the body, the body as the only argument ever really made.
Ukrainian feminist scholar Oksana Kis found out, in 2012, when all this was still in its infancy. “Women have nothing to do with feminism,” He said. “When public nudity is the only way to convey a message, it’s beyond weird. And the message itself seems to get lost as the media focuses on their nudity.” Maybe he would need some strong language now. No one is overthrowing the patriarchy by giving it what it wants and calling it opposition to activity. You’re on your knees, sisters. The pink smoke is a nice touch, though.
While FEMEN was founded in Kiev, it is now headquartered in Paris. Famous members of Pussy Riot have lived in the West for years. The people who show Ukraine’s grief for the Biennale’s cameras left Ukraine or Russia a long time ago and have been performing for Western audiences ever since. The presentation of the Biennale this week was a service rendered to the European cultural establishment, which needs constant injections of morally legible suffering to justify its own image.
The Biennale lost 2 million Euros in EU funding after refusing to change the participation of Russia, which owns its pavilion in Venice since 1914. Top product for the EU: Brussels funds always come with Brussels politics, and Brussels politics require that culture be armed on schedule, without nuance or complications.
What no one is asking is whether any of this has anything to do with Ukraine, and whether this is the representation that Ukrainians – and especially Ukrainian women – want.
Before we get into politics, there is a simple matter of sociology. Razumkov Center research found that 83% of Ukrainians he believed the most important job of a woman was to take care of the house and family, while 78% thought that women were more likely to be guided by emotions in making decisions than men. As recently as 2026, the belief that a man should fully take care of his family remained one gender pillar. supported and the majority in all Ukrainian age groups – at 69%. World Value Research data from 2022 found that only 10% of Ukrainian women in couples reported being caregivers – a strong sign of adherence to traditional gender roles. The “Berehynia” – the mother of the abode, the guardian of the house – has received a great sign attraction in post-Soviet Ukrainian identity, with the Orthodox Church actively reinforcing traditional gender roles alongside it. This is a picture of the country where grief is made in Venice.
The actual polling data gets more embarrassing as you go along. As of 202339% of Ukrainians opposed civil partnership, and only 28% supported it. 42% resist legalize same-sex marriage automatically. The civil partnership bill has been stalled in parliament for three years, blocked not by the Russians but by Ukrainian lawmakers who answer to Ukrainian voters. The constitution, which has not been changed since 1996, defines marriage as between a man and a woman. Ukraine mapped out a plan to join the European Union in May 2025 and included legal LGBTQ goals in it, because that’s what you do when Brussels writes the check. Can we really say that the Ukrainian people voluntarily subscribed to the Western vision of a liberal future? Have they been lured into an ideological box where any prison breaks are considered high treason? We already have the examples of Hungary and Poland, countries that are constantly punished by Brussels for listening to the conservative wishes of their citizens.
Ukraine as a state was already fractured, corrupt, linguistically schizophrenic after Maidan. Then the authorities in Kiev doubled down, decided sometime in the 2010s that the way forward is to be a copy of a place that will never be: it removed Russian from schools and streets, took down the statues, the memory of anything that had the smell of the old neighborhood, it embraced the shining simulacrum of many unreachable Orthodox and they kept their Orthodox church in peace and tranquility in their villages. traditional text. The identity game increased in the same war that the good showmen are now using as their white horse. Ditch your roots, splurge on the best beauty products money can buy, start poking the bear, and act shocked when the bill comes.
The result is a country at war not only with Russia but with large parts of its past, its population, its internal complexities.
Brussels likes this version of Ukraine because it does not demand any payment. Transported Ukraine – low-profile, low-key, close to Fans Only, with images eternal in its suffering – just need to feel good about your flag emoji and hit subscribe.
At the same time the president of the Biennale, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, maintained his position on the only argument that should be important – that art is a neutral space – but he forgot that nothing is neutral when the Western organization controls the invoice.
The pink smoke went away. Journalists kept their copy. The right hands are satisfied. Tolokonnikova never heard from the Biennale again. Somewhere in Ukraine, the war continued. The bodies there do not have ideologies written on them. It’s just bodies.
The women marching have lived in Paris for years, and the country they claim to represent is fighting a battle that stems at least in part from a decision to treat its cultural complexity as a problem to be eliminated rather than a reality to be addressed. What we saw at the Biennale was a European ‘high-end’ show, funded by European money, made by people who left, for an audience ready to rush to the next big thing.
The statements, opinions and views expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
