His goons seize her books, his apparatchiks have canceled her passport, and his spies seem certain to target her for death.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most targeted internal enemy is not a terrorist, a mutineering general, or an outspoken politician in the mold of Alexi Navaly: Instead, she is a quietly spoken poet with asymmetric hair and a vivid tattoo of a rose on her neck.
But Daria Serenko is, without doubt, the woman Putin fears most. And one he seems intent on destroying because she represents a stunning challenge to his hypermasculine vision of Russia.
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Her Feminist Anti-War Resistance movement, founded on the second day of the war in Ukraine, Feb. 29, 2022, galvanized women to speak out against the war in Ukraine. The group, which has been banned by the government, now involves thousands of women in 80 cities across Russia. Serenko struggles to break Russia’s patriarchal code and is thus a danger even in exile.
The Feminist Anti-War Resistance has organized hundreds of anti-war protests in at least 60 cities across Russia. Its activists publish anti-war poetry, slogans, and calls for action on price tags in shops, as well as on social media.
They distribute letters with the testimonies of Ukrainian women suffering from the war and a series of anti-war postcards. One of them said, “A war, again. No one talks about it. The hearts of our great-grandfathers and grandfathers ache when we dress up as soldiers, when we go to war against our neighbor.”
Serenko, 32, is not yet a household name in the West, but she has become one in Russia for the ferocity of Putin’s thuggish attempt to suppress her voice. In March, on the day Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff landed in Moscow for his first set of talks with Putin, the Russian president ordered his uniformed men to “remove 48 forbidden books off the shelves” of bookstores in St. Petersburg.
They included Serenko’s collection of poems. “You don’t have to burn the books; just make sure people stop reading them,” one of the goons said as he ordered the books removed.
Having her book banned is hardly the first attack on Serenko. Authorities designated her as a “foreign agent” in 2023 and, last year, the Kremlin labeled her group as an “undesirable organization,” the punishment for which is now six years in prison. Serenko spent the first two weeks of the war behind bars. Putin’s persecution forced her into exile in Georgia in March 2022.
Russian prosecutors charged Serenko with “evading the duties of a foreign agent.” In April 2024, Russia issued an arrest warrant for the feminist poet, denying her a new Russian passport. She is currently seeking political asylum in the European Union.
“Feminists are the most visible political power in the opposition; we have become actors on the streets across Russia,” Serenko told the Daily Beast, adding that when she sees them targeted for their work, she feels “furious” rather than fearful.
“We have spoken against the war from big stages in Europe and the United States, so we feminists are targeted as Russia’s key internal enemies along with LGBTQ+ people and migrants,” she said.
“Shortly after Putin started the war, I found a sign on my door that said: ‘Enemy of the people.’ I was in prison at the time,” she added. On Feb. 8, 2022, a Moscow court sentenced Serenko to 15 days in jail for “propaganda or public demonstration of Nazi attributes or symbols or attributes or symbols of extremist organizations.”
Serenko’s crime was a Sept. 2021 Instagram post of a red exclamation mark symbolizing the opposition’s “smart vote” strategy, which recommends voting for local candidates best positioned to defeat the ruling party. Serenko published it in support of the opposition leader Aleksey Navalny, who died in Feb. 2024 while in prison in what many Western governments have alleged was a Putin-ordered assassination.
But if Serenko is worried, she showed no sign of it in remarks to the Daily Beast. She remembered when her high-ranking employers in the Kremlin decided it was time to get rid of her in 2019 for engaging in activism. They gave her a choice: “My boss at the Ministry of Culture put it straight: ‘You are biting the hand that is feeding you.’ She gave an ultimatum: Either I act as a proper director of a state gallery or get fired to be an activist,” Serenko told The Daily Beast. “I chose to quit. The university where I worked also chose to say goodbye to me.”
As Putin has cracked down on dissent amid the war with Ukraine, he has also made the country more dangerous for women. Serenko fights for their safety even in exile.
On March 8, 2020, Russian feminists marked the International Day of Women’s Solidarity and the Struggle for Rights, protesting Putin’s decision to decriminalize domestic violence before the war with banners that said, “Putin is not a woman’s friend” and “We are not afraid to say.” Standing in front of the crowd, Serenko read the manifesto she had written for the rally.
“To me, the eighth of March is the day of memory for feminist women. Many of them died or were locked in prisons so that I would now have a chance to receive education, vote, work, have a right to divorce or own property,” Serenko said.
Russian feminists are angry. Nearly every week, the movement’s channel on Telegram publishes news about the murder of Russian women. The killers are husbands or boyfriends who act with impunity; President Putin pardons criminals who agree to fight on the front lines in Ukraine.
In February, Kirill Chaplygin stabbed his wife, Yekaterina, out of jealousy in front of her mother and five-year-old daughter, Eva, in Achinsk, Siberia. The woman almost escaped but got stuck in deep snow. “Eva will never forgive you!” she cried—her last words. Today, Chaplygin is asking Putin to pardon him in exchange for his Army service on the front.
“We have to stop the killings of women. Russia is number 70 out of all countries—one of the worst countries when it comes to protection of women from violence, domestic and sexual,” Serenko said.
Serenko sees parallels between her native Russia and the United States. She notes how the Trump administration is making life less safe for American victims of domestic violence, including women and transgender people.
“I want to stretch my hands to you across the oceans so we can know we are part of the same resistance,” she says. “As a person from a dictatorship, I can only tell you this: Don’t be afraid of becoming an alarmist—the dictatorship develops slowly, but at some point, you find yourself in a boiling pot.”
Serenko continues to organize new groups and community talks.
“We continue to unite feminist activists in Russia, but we are careful. No feminist group can be officially affiliated with us—that’s too dangerous. So we build networks underground, talk about reproductive justice, study history,” Serenko told the Daily Beast. “I am prepared to see myself on the list of terrorists.”
