The treatment of third-country nationals (TCNs) under EU law falls far short of the EU's commitments to eliminate gender inequality and to ‘combat all kinds of domestic violence’. Not only does Article 13(2)(c) of the EU Citizens’ Directive, as interpreted by the CJEU in Secretary of State for the Home Department v NA, fail to ‘safeguard’ the rights of TCNs, it may also enable domestic violence. When presented with an opportunity to remedy its disadvantageous treatment of TCNs by fully ratifying the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combatting Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (the Istanbul Convention), the Council of the EU chose instead to pursue a selective and partial ratification which leaves TCN victims without recourse to the very provisions designed to assist them. The European Parliament stated that it ‘regrets’ this approach, recommending instead ‘a broad EU accession … without any limitations’. This article's analysis of the EU Citizens’ Directive and Istanbul Convention supports this recommendation.

With RRW populist actors’ discovery of gender norms as a useful foreign policy tool, narratives constructed in terms of geographical value spaces have become central to the struggle for women's rights. Through a detailed examination of international and domestic actors’ engagement with the failed ratification process of the Istanbul Convention in Ukraine, this article aims to enhance understanding of the appropriateness of the use of these geographical value spaces when describing the struggle to combat GBV in Ukraine, and how connecting gender justice issues to geographically restricted value spaces impacts this fight. It finds that in practice neither the EU – despite Russia's allegations to the contrary – nor domestic political elites in favour of closer cooperation with Europe have provided meaningful support to the ratification of the Istanbul Convention. Faced with this situation, some Ukrainian feminists have increasingly sought to present the struggle to combat gender-based violence in a locally acceptable vernacular. This article, however, concludes that framing the struggle for women's rights in any type of geographical terms – be they of an international or domestic nature – increases the risk of either instrumentalisation of or selective engagement with the feminist agenda.