CHERNIHIV, Ukraine — 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 land mines. 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 3-year-old son to a local park
People listen to a woman with the Swiss demining foundation talk about the dangers of landmines in Chernihiv, Ukraine, July 27, 2022.
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. “The perception of women, in general, has been very paternalistic,” said Anna Kvit, a Ukrainian sociologist who specializes 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 defense and security sectors that filtered out broadly across society.
Hanna Maliar, Ukraine’s deputy defense 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. With men ages 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.
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 then the war began, and he volunteered for a local defense unit, leaving Maleks to work the farm alone.
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