Ukraine: War brings women new roles and new risks

Females are increasingly joining military, including in combat positions, and spearheading volunteer and fund-raising efforts 

Women have become an omnipresent force in Ukraine’s war six months in as  they confront long-held stereotypes about their role in the country’s post-Soviet  society.: File photo

Megan Specia, Emile Ducke   |   Chernihiv, Ukraine   |   29.08.22  : The road to the training site was lined with crumbling homes and damaged buildings, a reminder of how war had consumed the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv just months ago.

At the head of the class was a woman named Hanna, along with a board showing images of unexploded munitions and landmines. She explained to the class the risks of minefields and how they are marked. One woman attending the day’s training asked if it was safe to take her three-year-old son to a local park.

“Don’t walk in the woodland — it’s best not to walk there,” said Hanna, 34, advising her to stay on undisturbed paved areas.

Hanna, who asked that her surname not be used because of fears for her safety, is among a growing number of Ukrainian women who have been trained in demining, which until just a few years ago was on a list of hundreds of jobs women in the country were barred from holding.

Women have become an omnipresent force in Ukraine’s war six months in as they confront long-held stereotypes about their role in the country’s post-Soviet society.

They are increasingly joining the military, including in combat positions, and spearheading volunteer and fund-raising efforts. With men still making up a majority of combatants, women are taking on extra roles in civilian life, running businesses in addition to looking after their families.

Originally from Mariupol, Hanna joined a Swiss demining foundation there two years ago, and after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, she fled that southern port city and headed north.

Now, she is working in cities like Chernihiv, from which the Russian occupiers have since retreated, to make war-ravaged cities and towns safe from landmines.

“The perception of women, in general, has been very paternalistic,” said Anna Kvit, a Ukrainian sociologist who specialises in gender studies. “With this war that escalated in 2022, the agency of women not only increased, but it also became more visible.”

That shift has been underway for some time, Kvit said, with women increasingly taking on new roles after the 2014 conflict in eastern Ukraine, accelerating changes in the defence and security sectors that filtered out broadly across society. Women had been barred from combat roles, but they were still taking part in the fighting, although without the same status, benefits or recognition as men.

“In Ukrainian society, the resistance was, and probably still is, that the army and war are not a place for women,” Kvit said.

Legislation adopted in 2018 gave Ukrainian women the same legal status as men in the armed forces, and the shift drove a broader push for gender-inclusive labour reforms.

The new laws ended bans on women holding any of 450 occupations in Ukraine, a holdover from the Soviet era, when certain work was considered damaging to reproductive health. In addition to demining roles, that list had included long-haul trucking, welding, firefighting and many security and defence jobs.

Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, said that more than 50,000 women were now in the country’s armed forces, and that the number had risen significantly since the war began.

Despite this, the key decision makers and a majority of the combatants are men, often obscuring the increasingly vital role of women in the conflict, said Jenny Mathers, an expert in security, Russia and gender and conflict at Aberystwyth University in Britain.

“One of the many persistent truths is that women do an awful lot of the unacknowledged but really crucial work,” Mathers said. “War wouldn’t happen without them, and all the things that are going to sustain societies that are in conflict — many of them are done by women.”

Ukrainian women have become the backbone of wide-scale logistics efforts, Mathers noted, and are organising to make camouflage netting for troops, cooking for the millions of internally displaced people and raising money to support soldiers.

With men aged 18 to 60 prohibited from leaving the country so they can fight Russia, women are volunteering to drive transport cars from other countries in Europe for use by Ukraine’s military.

“When the war started, I was just thinking, ‘How can I be helpful?’” said Yevheniia Ustinova, 39, who is part of one of the countless groups that drive these transport cars to Ukraine.

During a brief stop at a cafe in Lviv, in western Ukraine, she described a two-day round-trip journey into Poland from her home in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to pick up a truck and then return to Ukraine.

“Everyone is doing what he or she can do,” she said.

These informal networks will be essential if peace returns, and they could play a vital role in rebuilding Ukraine, said Andrea Ellner, an expert in gender and war at King’s College London.

But she warned that stereotypes about women could “stand in the way” of female progress in a post-war Ukraine and obscure “how important they are”.

New York Times News Service