Passersby look at the exhibit in Vienna, 9 December 2025. Photo: Feminist Anti‑War Resistance
Feminist Anti‑War Resistance (FAS), one of Russia’s largest grassroots civil society movements, opened an exhibit featuring Russian women who have been imprisoned for their anti-war stance on a street in Vienna on Tuesday.
Dubbed Women Against War, the exhibition features 16 Russian women who faced jail time for their anti-war views and activism, with each woman’s story accompanied by a portrait painted of them by an anti-war artist.
“Being a journalist in a dictatorship is dangerous,” said Darya Apakhonchich, who painted a portrait of Oksana Baulina, a Russian journalist who was killed in a missile strike while on assignment in Kyiv in March 2022, adding that Baulina had chosen such a life “because she was against lies, against fascism.”
The exhibition also features a portrait of Olga Nazarenko, an anti-war activist who died in unexplained circumstances in 2023 after repeatedly displaying a Ukrainian flag from her balcony window in the central Russian city of Ivanovo.
“Other women who are still alive continue to create and write, and we have a unique opportunity to hear their stories,” Apakhonchich said. “For them, the greatest reward is to be heard and seen for their resistance to the regime.”
Also featured in the exhibit are theatre director Yevgenia Berkovich and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk, both of whom are still in prison after being jailed in 2024 for “justifying terrorism” with their production of Petriychuk’s play about Russian ISIS brides, Finist, the Bright Falcon.
Other prominent activists featured in the exhibition include Nadezhda Rossinskaya, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for aiding Ukrainian refugees, and journalist Maria Ponomarenko, who was sentenced to six years in prison in February 2023 for “spreading false information about the Russian army”.
Rossinskaya’s portrait was painted by Sasha Skochilenko, a Russian artist and musician who was herself imprisoned for leaving anti-war messages on price labels in her local supermarket, but who was released in a prisoner swap with the West in August 2024.
The exhibit’s organisers said that their aim was to draw attention to human rights abuses and the persecution of women in Russia as well as to raise funds to support female political prisoners.
“This exhibit is a political statement against Russian and pro-Russian propaganda, which has been successful in Europe, and in Austria in particular,” said Lölja Nordic, co-founder of FAS. “It is a warning about how political repression can escalate if we do not make enough effort to stop it.”
