Russian President Vladimir Putin digressed during a meeting with municipal officials from around the country on January 16 to comment on bathrooms in foreign countries.
"Common bathrooms for boys and girls or something like that -- it has become an ordinary, everyday thing," he said, before adding a baseless claim that many Russians who had previously left the country had begun returning because of this issue.
"It is very difficult for people with traditional, normal human values to live under such circumstances," Putin asserted.
His comments came just days after St. Petersburg Governor Aleksandr Beglov posted on Telegram about a visit with soldiers who had been wounded fighting in Ukraine. Such men, he said, "understand why we are fighting."
"You don't need to explain the values we are defending to these guys who have seen school toilets where instead of two bathrooms -- one for boys and one for girls, there were three bathrooms -- for girls, boys, and gender neutrals," he wrote.
Such pronouncements produced a wave of ridicule on Russian social media, with some Russians speculating that the third bathrooms in Ukrainian schools -- if indeed they exist at all -- were for teachers and others noting that such complaints seem strange considering that according to government figures, more than one-fifth of Russian households lack indoor toilets.
"If I were Beglov, I would 'shed blood' for something completely different," wrote journalist and blogger Aleksandr Khots on Facebook. "In Russia, at least 20 percent of the population still visits outhouses, which often exist in the singular. But the guardians of empire prefer to teach their neighbors how to go to the toilet rather than mastering toilets themselves instead of a hole in the ground."
Controlling The Message
But the toilet rhetoric comes at the start of a noncompetitive, highly controlled presidential-election campaign that the Kremlin views as a chance to demonstrate public support for Putin, 71, and for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine that he unleashed in February 2022.
For the government, the campaign "presents a challenge because the regime must demonstrate a complete willingness and a complete ability to manage social processes," political analyst Kirill Rogov said.
"The war is unpopular," he told RFE/RL's Russian Service. "Putin is at the end of his career and people are tired of him. He does not promise anything for the future."
Events of recent weeks have tested the Kremlin's ability to control the messaging as the March presidential election approaches. Protests by relatives of mobilized soldiers have popped up around the country. Tens of thousands of Russians across the country have been left without heating or hot water in the depths of winter as aging and poorly maintained infrastructure has collapsed.
As the full-scale invasion approaches its third year, a grinding near-stalemate that is occasionally punctuated by embarrassing setbacks for Russia, such as Kyiv's January 15 assertion that it had shot down a $300 million A-50 airborne early-warning-radar aircraft and the December 2023 sinking of a Russian Navy landing ship in the occupied Crimean port of Feodosia.
Resisting The 'Satanic' West
For the Kremlin, analysts say, such developments increase the attractiveness of turning to narratives about "gender-neutral toilets" and "traditional values" -- of doubling down on Putin's portrayal of Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine as part of a defensive battle to protect Russia and the rest of the world from what he casts as a decadent, immoral, overly liberal West.
Case in point: In an interview with The Spectator earlier this month, pro-Kremlin far-right ideologist Aleksandr Dugin described Russia's attack on Ukraine as "a kind of religious act" and "the beginning of the fight against Satan."
In July 2023, Russia banned gender transitions, annulled marriages in which one person has "changed gender," and barred transgender people from adopting children. In November 2023, the Russian Supreme Court upheld the government's request to list the nonexistent "international LGBT social movement" as an "extremist" organization.
"With its decision, the Supreme Court permitted the law enforcement organs to apply the full force of anti-extremism legislation to LGBT people, their supporters, and those involved in LGBT initiatives," said lawyer Maks Olenichev, who works with LGBT clients. "And the anti-extremism laws are extremely amorphous."
"As the decision comes into effect, LGBT stereotypes will be strengthened in Russian society," he added.
'Bad Dream Of An Aging Chekist'
Fyodor Tsipilev, an LGBT activist who left Russia two years ago, agreed, saying the government's actions had led to the "activization of marginal forces" in society -- so far primarily online.
"But in the future it will increasingly move offline," he said. "The risks for LGBT people, and not only them, will only grow. Homophobes have publicly been given the green light."
Vitaly Bovar is a former St. Petersburg municipal lawmaker who has opposed the war against Ukraine and has spoken publicly against the vilification of the LGBT community.
"These homophobic and transphobic laws are genocide in practice, an attempt to destroy human diversity in Russia. Our society has fallen into the bad dream of an aging chekist," he told RFE/RL, using a term to describe agents of the Russian security organs.
"And I am not just speaking of Putin," he said, referring to the fact that the president for many years was an agent of the Soviet KGB and in the 1990s headed its successor, the Federal Security Service. "He did not initiate these laws by himself."
