“I Became a Man”: The Unmaking of Transnational Marriages Among Displaced Ukrainians in Lithuania

Abstract

The 2022 Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine produced an unprecedented gender-selective displacement and separated millions of wives and children from husbands bound by the mobilisation law. This paper aims to examine and demonstrate how wartime displacement has unmade transnational marriages among displaced Ukrainian women in Lithuania. The primary data of the research is drawn from the multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted across five Lithuanian cities between 2024 and 2025. Based on 22 Ukrainian interlocutors (17 women and 5 men), the study traces how spousal roles, obligations, and emotional bonds were reconfigured and were eventually unmade under the pressures of separation. Grounded in transnational social fields theory, moral economy frameworks, and constructivist gender theory, the analysis identifies three interlocking processes driving marital breakdown: the enforcement of gendered moral scripts demanding that men fight and women wait; the progressive emotional alienation produced by protracted separation and diverging life trajectories; and the identity transformation of displaced wives who assumed traditionally male spousal roles in exile, encapsulated in the recurring phrase ‘I became a man’. The paper argues that these marital breakdowns, though perceived as individual cases of failures by the interlocutors themselves, are structurally produced outcomes of wartime moral regimes operating simultaneously across two societies. This study contributes to migration studies by foregrounding breakdown and fragility rather than resilience, and is based primarily on women’s accounts, a limitation that is explicitly acknowledged throughout.