Nudity for NATO: The OnlyFans strategy for saving Ukraine

Pussy Riot and FEMEN’s Venice Biennale protest showed the version of Ukraine the EU knows how to consume: obedient and stripped for export Yellow and blue smoke rose, and out of it appeared a pair of breasts with “RUSSIA KILLS” written across bare skin. The performance was optimized for the press preview circuit, providing free self-pleasuring material for the Ukrainian-flags-in-bio crowd and their patriarchy-fighting-for-easy-body-access comrades alike. The Venice Biennale! A handful of balaclava-wearing half-naked performance artists from Pussy Riot and FEMEN barricaded the Russian pavilion for all of 30 minutes to protest against its opening in support of Ukraine. Nadya Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot’s greatest hits machine, grumbled that she had to sneak in under an assumed name because the organizers wouldn’t book her table. Mission accomplished: the world’s most pretentious artsy crowd got another virtue-signal photo op – cheeky dose of solitary-viewing fuel for the right hand included. It would be best described as museum-grade thirst. A brief deliberate detour into bedroom-Pulitzer territory. Watching organizations that claim to fight the patriarchy deploy the patriarchy’s oldest currency is quite ironic. Their weaponry doesn’t consist of arguments, intellectualism or difficult work of political thought: they offer up bodies for display, courting the male gaze they claim to loathe. Whether there is a slogan written across naked breasts or not, the ask is the same as it always has been: look at me, look at my flesh. The patriarchy, being neither stupid nor ungrateful, obliges. Here is what makes this specifically funny, if you have the stomach for it. FEMEN was founded in 2008 after its founder became aware of Ukrainian women being duped into going abroad and sexually exploited. Its original slogan was “Ukraine is not a brothel.” It protested sex tourism, trafficking, and prostitution – the industries that were consuming Ukrainian women’s bodies for foreign money.

That was the mission. Fast forward to Venice 2026, and we’re observing the same movement stripping for the cameras of foreign journalists at a European art fair, making sure the lighting is good, giving the gentlemen of the international press something to look at. Read more Russian pavilion opens at Venice Biennale despite sanctions and protests Tolokonnikova, for her part, took the logic to its natural conclusion. In 2021, she opened an OnlyFans account selling subscriptions to images of herself for $10 a month. It is, by any functional definition, what FEMEN was founded to fight: a woman selling access to her body to men, for money, on a platform owned by Leonid Radvinsky, born in Odessa, who acquired OnlyFans in 2018 and steered it deliberately toward pornography, extracting hundreds of millions in annual dividends from the arrangement before dying in March of this year. Though to call this a fall from grace would be to misread the CV. Before Pussy Riot there was art collective Voina: a pregnant Tolokonnikova among couples having sex in a state biology museum days before the 2008 presidential election – the action titled F*ck for the Heir Puppy Bear . Then a supermarket chicken, inserted into a vagina in protest at the police state. Then a giant phallus, painted on a drawbridge in St Petersburg directly opposite the FSB headquarters. The body, provocative; provocation through the body, the body as the only argument ever really being made. The Ukrainian feminist scholar Oksana Kis noticed, back in 2012, when this was all still nascent. “Femen has nothing to do with feminism whatsoever,” she said. “When public nudity becomes the only way to deliver a message, it’s more than strange. And the message itself seems to get lost while media focus on their nakedness.” She would probably need stronger language now.