Inside Putin’s Red (lipstick) Army
Ed Cumming on the steely and media savvy women at the forefront of Russia’s new propaganda war
On Thursday, Europe and America woke up to perhaps the most distressing images to emerge from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Heavily pregnant women, and new mothers clutching babies, were escorted from the blackened ruins of a maternity hospital in Mariupol that had been destroyed by an airstrike, in which three people were killed. They were the sort of unforgettable photographs that can come to define a war. Proof, if it were needed, that Russia is waging war not on the army, but on Ukraine itself.
One woman was apparently unmoved, however: Maria Zakharova, director of the information and press department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Putin’s inscrutable spokesman. Asked about the attack in a press briefing, she went on the offensive. “This is information terrorism,” she said, claiming that Ukrainian reports about the airstrike were fake. This followed her earlier claims that Ukraine was developing biological weapons.
To the unfamiliar, Zakharova’s sinister tone might seem shocking, but there is nothing new about it. She is merely the most prominent soldier in a clone army of media savvy Russian women who have taken on the job of lying for the Putin regime. They do it in fluent English, with apparent relish, and there are seemingly no depths to which they will not stoop.
It may still be men driving the tanks and jumping out of planes. But in the new propaganda war, Putin’s elite shock troops are women.
In a country that was used to government press briefings being conducted by dry men in drab suits, these women, with their swashbuckling style and salty jokes, as well as bright lipstick, big hair and sharp outfits, have been a breath of fresh air. Zakharova’s briefings have become must-watch events, amassing millions of views on Youtube.
A mixture of steel and showbiz has turned them into celebrities. Who cares if they are doing the devil’s work?
Yet Putin is far from the only authoritarian world leader to have employed smart women to help with his messaging. Between 2017 and 2020, Donald Trump used his political adviser Kellyanne Conway to similar effect, often via Fox News. It was Conway who defended then-press secretary Sean Spicer’s use of “alternative facts,” and who invented a fictitious atrocity, the Bowling Green Massacre, to defend the president’s immigration ban. For decades before she retired, the North Korean newsreader Ri Chun-hee, sometimes called the “Pink Lady” for her brightly coloured outfits, delivered national news – about nuclear developments or the ongoing success of the leadership – in stern, sometimes melodramatic tones.
“I don’t know if Putin and these other leaders are deliberately choosing women, or if it’s simply that they are the best people for the job,” says Jo Tanner, a communications consultant and former adviser to Boris Johnson. “Possibly there’s a macho element in these male leaders choosing female spokeswomen.
“I can see the logic of putting up a woman to defend an attack on a maternity hospital. You would be trying to take away the hard edges. But Zakharova is pretty robust in her delivery.”
So much so that she, along with Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today), have been put on the EU sanctions list alongside oligarchs – Zakharova for having “promoted the deployment of Russian forces in Ukraine”.
Simonyan first came to attention in the UK in 2018 when she conducted the bizarre interview with the Salisbury Novichok poisoners, in which they claimed to be a friendly gay couple who had simply visited the town in order to see the cathedral’s “famous 123m spire”.
When she was asked how she felt about being sanctioned by the EU, she replied sarcastically, “Maria Zakharova and I took out handkerchiefs,” in order to “have a little cry.”
Then there is Maria Butina, who was convicted of spying for Russia against the US in 2018, and now serves in the State Duma. On Wednesday, in a Today interview with Nick Robinson that sent marmalade spiralling from spoons all over Britain, she claimed that Ukrainians were shelling themselves. Nor should we forget Anna Chapman, the flame haired former spy, who found time this week to come out in support of the war, in between flogging children’s clothes on Instagram. Senator and government spokesman Valentina Matviyenko, meanwhile, claims that the invasion was the “only way to stop a brotherly war”.
Jo Tanner says it’s a moot point whether these women are party to their own lies. “Internally, these spokespeople are playing on the fact that their own people have limited access to other sources of information,” she says. “The whole invasion is based on a complete lie, and is being fuelled by a continuation of that. You would hope that the spokespeople are being duped and they don’t know the truth when they’re delivering it. But you have to question that. They are cultured people doing these jobs. They must be able to see the other sources of information around the world, contradicting what they are saying.”
Although Putin’s female mouthpieces have come up via different routes, they have in common conservative views and a history of unswerving loyalty to the chief. Simonyan was a Kremlin reporter, cutting her teeth during the Chechen War before being made editor of Russia Today when she was just 25. “She has a strong journalistic background,” says Emily Ferris, a research fellow at Rusi, a think tank, who specialises in Russia and Eurasia. “She was part of the Kremlin press pack.
She proved that she was someone who could be trusted.”
Butina was an assistant for Aleksandr Torshin, a Putin ally, who was sent to infiltrate American institutions, including the NRA, in the run-up to the 2016 election. Matviyenko is a longtime Putin loyalist, something which helped her become the first female leader of St Petersburg.
Perhaps the most interesting is Zakharova, with a CV that could have taken her anywhere. Her mother was an art historian and her father was Russia’s ambassador to Beijing, where the family lived for 10 years, as a result of which Zakharova speaks fluent Chinese. She has the Russian equivalent of a PHD.
“Zakharova is particularly aggressive against the West, which I think some Russians might view as a display of strength” says Ferris. “But Russia is still a pretty misogynistic country, and she also counters a lot of traditional visions of how women should be. I wouldn’t say I admire her, exactly, but it’s very difficult to be a woman in that role.”
Sometimes called Putin’s “troll-inchief ”, Zakharova has built a reputation as one of the Russian president’s most combative outriders, unafraid to take the fight to the press. At one notorious briefing in 2018, she confronted a Finnish journalist who had dared to ask about an anti-lgbt campaign being prosecuted in Chechnya by its leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. Stepping out from behind her lectern, Zakharova suggested that the journalist might go and see for himself.
“You’re not afraid, are you?” she said. “We’re not joking.” Then she winked.
“It was very awkward and uncomfortable,” Erkka Mikkonen told reporters afterwards. “It was like getting called out by the teacher in school. She was trying to make me feel like an idiot.”
“She really likes her job; she gets a kick out of what she does,” Aleksey Maslov, an economics professor who taught Zakharova in the early Noughties, told Buzzfeed. “She has turned PR management for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs into high theatre.”
“Partly these roles have ended up being filled by women because they are less prestigious than the big internal jobs,” says Mark Galeotti, a professor at UCL who specialises in Russia. “But there’s also an awareness that a succession of dull apparatchiks in grey suits didn’t work at punching up the message. Whereas the Zakharovas of the world absolutely get the coverage and the attention. It’s Ann Coulter syndrome.
“Their roles mean that a lot of these women are more famous outside of Russia than at home,” he says. “Butina was a kind of accidental celebrity. Simonyan is a shrewd careerist, with an eye for what will catch people’s attention. It’s hard to know what she believes in her heart of hearts, but at a certain point you make your choices.
“Zakharova is probably a different case. She enjoys the combative nature of her job. My sense is that she absolutely believes what she’s saying.”
They are also proof that for a certain kind of ambitious young woman, the Kremlin can offer a path to the top faster than the private sector.
“It’s not equal opportunities, exactly,” explains Galeotti. “But the Kremlin is interested in tapping whatever human resources it has. Leave your morals at the door, and it helps if you’re attractive.”