How Ukraine’s women inspire us with their stoicism – Jayne Dowle

Now we have women older than my mother – including Valentyna Konstantynovska, 79, who has taken part in civilian combat training in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine – picking up AK-47s.

We see mothers and daughters joining the Molotov cocktail production line on park benches in Kyiv, filling wine bottles with petrol.

And we witness millions of women and children fleeing literally for their lives out of Ukraine, pulling suitcases, pushing prams and shushing babies like some grotesque version of a day trip with no return ticket.

In early March, what is of over-riding concern is saving the people of Ukraine from obliteration and their cities and towns from destruction at the hands of the Russian military.

Whilst the fate of the planet is ultimately, inextricably linked with the actions of governments, and none of us can ignore climate change, we should mark IWD by taking few moments to share our respect for the women of Ukraine.

This isn’t about gender politics. I have absolutely no time at the moment for debate over how many sexes we should have and whether all lavatories should be open to everyone, regardless of how they identify.

Millions of people in Ukraine right now don’t even have access to a lavatory. Imagine giving birth in an underground bomb shelter? Women are on the front line, it’s as simple as that. You’ve probably seen the social media pictures of former beauty queen Anastasiia Lenna, who represented Ukraine in the 2015 Miss Grand International beauty pageant, swapping crown and sash for camouflage gear and gun.

And you may have also seen more than one female Ukrainian MP taking up arms to inspire other women with courage and to show Russia’s tyrant Vladimir Putin that there is no gender divide over firing a gun.

However, scepticism must be tempered with realism. Ukrainian MP and mother-of-three Lesia Vasylenko, 34, says simply that she has amassed a collection of guns to defend herself and her family because picking up a gun is “a matter of survival for all the women across Ukraine right now”.

And you would, wouldn’t you? Women have been armed in many countries and conflicts for decades now, including the Second World War, when they fought in the French Resistance.

However, events in Ukraine are bringing this contentious matter into sharp focus. Anna Kovalenko, a former Ukrainian MP who heads the 39th Maidan Women’s Self-Defence Hundred, a 2,500-strong organisation providing support, information and voluntary services to the armed forces, told reporters that women fighters help to “make men braver”, adding: “When women are in battalions, the men will not run away.”

And women are behind the lines too. I’ve had a few ill-tempered debates with people recently about the outpouring of aid from ordinary British people for the millions of Ukrainians caught up in the conflict.

Why support them, I’ve been asked, when you didn’t go out of your way to support those who lost everything in Aleppo, for instance, at the hands of Russian brutalism?

Well, first of all this argument is reductive and gets us nowhere, sowing yet further division when really anyone who believes in equality should be 
pulling together. And, secondly, there is so much connective tissue between our lives in Britain and those of Ukrainians. And women, who run lives, feel it poignantly.

Ms Vasylenko’s to-do list app on her phone lists her tasks for the week. Overdue tasks from before the war broke out include getting a manicure and pedicure, signing up her kids to swimming lessons and booking a yoga class.

She has cut her long, manicured nails short to better use her guns, but refuses to delete the tasks, saying: “I am still confident that I will come back to it and know when I will reschedule those tasks for.”

And this is what I mean. It’s not frivolous or bandwagon-jumping. It’s about shared experience, women with responsibilities, and surely this is the point of an International Women’s Day.

We are only at the other side of 
Europe, and we understand and we identify. There is no getting away from that, but perhaps, when this awful bloody war is eventually done, we will have all learned lessons about how quickly normality can be wrested away from civilisation, whoever we are and wherever we live.

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