From this point of view, Putin's masculinity has been his trademark since he stepped into
office. Putin's regime has increasingly relied on very conventional gender and sexual
norms by "remasculinize" his image and using a masculine persona to increase Russia's
image in the post-Cold War era (Sperling et al., 2022). Some of his articulation is to
dissimulate authoritarianism as masculine and democracy as feminine. Russian media
also adopted the strict black-and-white enunciation of gender nuance in portraying
Ukraine's first pro-democracy revolution in 2004 and Putin's response to Georgia Rose's
revolution in 2003. Further, some academics refer to Putin's behavior as "hyper-
masculine performances, "resembling an action consciously taken to produce a specific
public performance. He often articulates the notion of masculinity by posing shirtless
while riding horses, petting tigers, firing big guns, and doing martial arts for the cameras,
which have become an inherent part of his brand (Grouard, 2022).
By far, his articulation of masculinity is often portrayed as a power play. A "hegemonic
project" deeply rooted in gender dominance by overusing masculine symbols can be
linked to the Russian image as a strong country (Wood, 2016). The common association
of leadership masculinities finds a strong presence in wartime. The relationship between
masculinities and war is either causal or constitutive (Hutchings 2008). On one account,
masculinity remains a crucial ingredient in a war. On another account, the social practice
of war manifests a constitutive redefinition of men's masculinities (Goldstein, 2001). In
short, scholars often constitute masculinities as enabling precondition to war and vice
versa (Elshtain, 1995; Barrett, 2001; Enloe, 2014). The above notion has become a
predominant narrative in a patriarchal cultural realm. Hence, Putin's action to attack
Ukraine works best within the image of a masculine image, which he cast persistently.
The most recent is the war against Ukraine.
While it consistently manifested in Putin's everyday political masculinities, it also
provoked various responses in the real world and social media, especially Twitter. Digital
analysis by Evello (2022) suggested that many Indonesian netizens responded to the
Russian attack on Ukraine in late February 2022. The survey also concluded that Putin's
popularity spiked shortly after he launched the first attack. Our preliminary digital
observation found that Indonesian netizens frequently intonated discussions about
Putin's physics and courage in the war. The pattern is repeatedly shown in Vietnam. The
most salient pro-Russia narratives in Vietnam's cyberspace revolve around justifying
Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, echoing anti-America and anti-imperialist worldviews, and
lionizing Russia while demonizing Ukraine (Ha and Luong, 2022).
Ha and Luong (2022) later argued that Pro-Russia narratives in Vietnam's cyberspace
are the result of cross-pollination between sentimental attachment since the Soviet era,
psychological bias towards Russia embedded in Vietnam's education and propaganda
system, and the overriding imperative to preserve the Vietnamese state's political and
ideological interests. We also found the same pattern happening in Indonesia.
Nevertheless, when we delve into the data details, we find a denoting amount of
masculine tone usage to express the pro-Russian narrative. We depart from this notion
to further investigate the linkage between Putin's masculinities and the pro-Russia
narrative voiced by Indonesian netizens. Here, we employ gender lenses to grasp how
masculinity plays a significant role. We argue that the pro-Russia response developed by