In the character of the fascist strongman who has become a cult figure in the global far-right, we can see someone who has been valued at home and abroad precisely for his compensatory masculinism (Löffler, Luyt, & Starck, 2020) as well as ridiculed in Western media (Wiedlack, 2020). Masculinity is mobilized as a rhetorical figure and symbolic resource in the brutal reality for all these young men and women that have to go into a war declared by older men. War re-installs gendered demarcation lines that many of us, naively, thought was a relic from the past. The gender dynamics of the invasion of Ukraine are impossible to ignore. The horrors of war are happening closer to our own countries than many of us have experienced in our lifetimes. After over 20 years in which the so-called ‘War on Terror’ wrought death and destruction ‘elsewhere’, 1 the actual conflict between sovereign nation-states, with the prospect of spilling over into yet another European war involving multiple nation-states is now a reality. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has also meant that we, non-Ukrainian Europeans, find ourselves in a time in which the term ‘crisis’ has taken on a much more direct presence. Ukrainians awoke on the 24th of February 2022 to find themselves in a conflict over which many had been dreading but which almost as many had also thought impossible.
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