They began enlisting during the Crimean War, and today Kiev’s armed forces have one of the highest percentages of female soldiers in the world, with nearly 57,000 personnel.
“We are not afraid of death; we are afraid to be slaves”. Kristina quit her job at a supermarket in Italy weeks before Russia invaded her country. At the age of 29, this young woman, who also made a living as a singer at weddings, is one of 57,000 female soldiers who have enlisted in the Ukrainian armed forces to fight the Russians in Donbas, where Moscow has taken control of hundreds of square miles of territory lost. in a few weeks: two months ago it controlled almost 25% of southeastern Ukraine, now it colonizes barely 17%, according to Western strategists.
“The risk of saying goodbye to life is always there. But I will stay in my country until the end,” says Kristina, convinced that she will only return to Italy with her parents on the day when the invaders on the other side of the border have completely withdrawn. Kira Rudik is also looking forward to that moment. He will then go back to planting flowers in the garden of his home in Kiev. As a parliamentarian for the pro-European Voz party, she explains: “I never touched a weapon until the war started.” he doesn’t put him in the sun or in the shade. He leads a civilian militia. He often listens to the tirades of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which encourages him to keep smearing his AK-47. “When he says he wants peace, is it that he wants war; then you must get your gun, “he asserts with an inappropriate maturity for one who has not yet turned thirty.
“I am proud that a third of our army is made up of strong and brave women,” parliament vice president Olena Kondratyuk stressed at a conference in the Ukrainian capital on Monday. “This means that women can build, develop, teach, have successful careers, raise children and, if necessary, protect their families and their state.” It is a “new reality” that “should not be underestimated” but “acknowledged”.
The General Staff seems to be on this path: When the war started last February, many recruits were given male uniforms and it’s “very hard to fight like that,” ironically Emerald Evgeniya, a sniper known on the battlefield as “Jeanne d’bow’. “They gave me one that was three sizes bigger than mine,” says this shooter, fond of recounting her daily experience on Tik Tok.
Evgeniya came back in mid-September after becoming pregnant. His partner is a soldier he met in the trenches. They got married in a forest in Kharkov. The guests, all well-armed battalion colleagues, kept an eye on the sky during the ceremony to prevent possible drone attacks. “I didn’t say anything to my husband or the commanders for the first two months and I was at war defending the country, until morning sickness tormented me,” the sniper says of her impending motherhood. The baby’s gender is unknown, but it will be “a future male or female defender of Ukraine”.
A colleague of Evgeniya notes that the situation for women has improved significantly since the start of the invasion. He makes it clear that “nobody patronizes us, we’re still one of the unit,” acknowledging that feminine hygiene products, boots of the right design and size, and custom body armor are now arriving in supply shipments. “The masculine is useless,” he insists. It leaves too many holes open for bullets. “Women have wider hips, narrower waists and the plates of the vests should be lighter for the back,” illustrates this soldier, “proud to carry unassisted” with all the weight of her body armor, the helmet, a huge backpack and a gun.
To locate the first female fighters in Ukraine, it is necessary to go back to the 2013 Maidan riots that ousted President Viktor Yanukovych. , but his role was made invisible. They faced enemy bullets, but also quite a few atavisms and self-deprecation to take down. An example illustrates this clearly: in Crimea, the army recruited women to work as cooks, logisticians or nurses. However, the female snipers and soldiers did not appear in the records.
The key moment came in 2016 when the General Staff officially recognized female troops, and in 2018 with the passage of equality laws that fully equated them with their male counterparts. Today, any woman between the ages of 18 and 60 can enlist in the military, train as a professional, and be mobilized. Military service, of course, is compulsory only for men.
Yet the Defense Ministry continues to show huge signs of misogyny, such as when it issued an order last year for female soldiers to parade in heels — not boots like their peers — on the anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from Russia. There are also complaints about the stereotypes linking the value and beauty of the Ukrainian military, all a cliché of a cheap video store. “Women have had to face and face many conditions of a macho society,” says the political opposition that described the 2021 parade proposed by Defense as a “medieval” idea, eventually rejected when the photos of the rehearsals, with the soldiers the step with high-heeled shoes scandalized the media and social groups.
A sign of progressivism aside, gender norms are the result of a decline due to the weight of reality, due in part to the growing need for troops in the face of the Russian military threat in Donbas and the urgent need to end complaints of sexual harassment and discrimination. Evgeniya had to confront a colleague who tried to attack her. “Keep it up, I’ll shoot you in the leg and then I’ll say it was the Russians,” snapped this former businesswoman, who learned how to handle a gun from her father as a child.
While the Vice President of Parliament calculates that the female presence extends to a third of the armed forces, other sources estimate their true share to be between 22% and 25%. However, this percentage undoubtedly increases if we add the women who work in field hospitals and logistics structures after military training. The 56,726 soldiers currently counted by the Ministry of Defense represent a clear quantum leap compared to the 16,557 who entered service following the 2013 Maidan riots. In the seven years since, nearly 5,000 have been promoted to officers and 14,000 have participated in anti-terrorist operations or in key positions in Donbas. There are few armies with so much female presence. The United States has 16% female soldiers in its ranks and Germany 12%. In Russia, male predominance is almost absolute.
The television presenter Solomiya Vitvitska organizes marathons and solidarity events to raise money to buy drones and send them to the army. She herself is training to become a pilot of these devices, essential in containing Russian troops. Why did a very popular journalist in Ukraine decide to share her work at the helm of the country’s main news channels with the military? “Because no one understands how events will unfold, how we will have to survive this winter and what will happen to all of us in general. Therefore, it is necessary to have some useful skills that may be needed even in battle, “solomiya explained in an interview with a Kiev newspaper.
Her ex-husband joined a battalion at the start of the invasion. His brother and sister-in-law are also currently fighting at the front. “I am in constant contact with them,” the journalist says without hiding her concern, admitting that life in Kiev is getting harder every day because of the Russian bombings. “I don’t have gas in the house, and of course it’s hard to get it back now, but I hope at least we still have some electricity, if only for cooking.” However, he warns that all these inconveniences are nothing compared to the situation in Kherson, where Irina spends hours in the trenches and cellars. Irina is a former language student turned recult, she suffers from the unbearable noise and vibration of the bombs dropped by the Russian artillery that constantly stun her, but above all she has become accustomed to the eternal panic. “We’re all scared,” he says. “So does the military. We suffer from the fear of constant uncertainty, of not knowing if we will be alive tomorrow.
Source: La Verdad
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