These are the women at the front of the political battle against Putin

Putin renewed his rule over Russia for another six-year term in a questionable election with genuine opposition candidates barred and a billionaire campaign by Kremlin-controlled media.

According to The Washington Post, the Russian Central Election Commission claimed a record-high turnout. Still, the international community, including the US, believes the voting failed to meet basic democratic standards.

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Dissenting voices have been growing in and outside Russian borders for years, especially after Putin's incursion in Ukraine. Politico describes the Kremlin's battle to shut them as a "whack-a-mole game."

Putin's opposers keep popping up unexpectedly all over the country, and they also look different: many of them are women.

According to Politico, which made a list of the women confronting Putin, the gender diversification of the opposition is surprising in a country that holds patriarchal and military values to a high standard.

The perfect example of that shift is Yulia Navalnaya. The wife of the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny decided to continue her husband's work after his passing.

Navalnaya went from presenting herself as a wife and homemaker with no interest in politics to stepping into the shoes of the most visible face of Putin's opposition.

The magazine said her transformation is not an isolated event. Months before, Yekaterina Dutsova, a 40-year-old single mother from Siberia, launched her presidential candidacy.

"Somebody had to," Duntsova told Politico, as most of the veteran opposition was in exile or prison. The Russian election commission blocked her candidacy, but she is launching a new political party.

Her platform, based on ending the war in Ukraine, is also one of the most significant drivers of the growth in the number of women opposing Putin, with feminist groups and soldier's families commanding the voices.

That was the case for Maria Andreyeva, the frontwoman of a movement of soldiers' wives and relatives protesting the war and demanding the return of their husbands.

The wife's movement has a more traditional and conservative undertone, but there are also feminist groups opposing the war.

There is another clear example of that: Alexandra Skochilenko. The activist was sentenced to seven years in prison for replacing supermarket price tags with anti-war messages.

Russian anti-war and feminism have grown but are far from becoming mainstream movements. According to Politico, it has been easy for the Kremlin to use sexism as a tool against high-profile female opposers.

Russian lawmakers have also toyed with the idea of declaring feminism as an "extremist ideology" in the same way they have done with the LGBTIQ+ community.

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Putin has also named 2024 "the year of the family," and the state media presents the image of women who are as loyal to the Kremlin as they are to their husbands as an ideal.