Following the outbreak of the full-scale war against Ukraine, links of gendered tropes with international aggression have become painfully prominent, not only in national security discourse, but also in varied aspects of language and culture. The present chapter examines the role of language and gender in the legitimization of war, by focusing on a new form of Russian government-sponsored cultural production known as Z-poetry. Using a corpus of Z-poetry’s most comprehensive collection, we analyze the constructions of masculinity and femininity in relation to the constructions of military conflict. In broadest light, our analysis confirms earlier observations of militarism as constructing aggression as a masculine ideal, where metaphor plays an important role in naturalizing violence against a dehumanized enemy. However, the analysis also suggests that the aggressive masculinization is prompted by different dynamics of social change in Russia, and used to express anxieties over growing anti-war sentiment and resistance to warfare more common among younger generations. We will argue that the role of gender in normalizing conflict and constructing the (im)possibility of peace requires critical discursive interrogation beyond this single context of aggression.