Invisible, no more

Photo: Krysja / Shutterstock

“The realities of the armed conflict in the East forced Ukraine to reconsider the state policy regarding servicewomen, and to develop it in accordance with international legislative standards”, explains a representative of the defence ministry. As of late 2020, about 25,000 female soldiers were serving in combat positions, of which 3,400 were officers. Another 31,000 women were holding civilian positions in the army, bringing the percentage of women in the Ukrainian army to 10.6 per cent, close to the NATO average of 10.9 per cent. Over the course of the conflict, an estimated 10,000 servicewomen have participated in combat missions in Donbas.

Invisible battalion

Yet this state of affairs has not been achieved overnight, and those recent developments are owed in no small part to the work of activists, scholars and servicewomen themselves. The most publicised and wide-ranging of these efforts is the 2015 advocacy campaign dubbed the “Invisible Battalion”. What started out initially as an academic sociological study conducted in the wake of the EuroMaidan protests soon turned into a successful drive to open more combat positions to women and generally to improve the life and career prospects of servicewomen within the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The study was instrumental in bringing about, in June 2016, the Decree of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine No. 292, which opened more than 100 combat military positions to women. Until then, they were only allowed to occupy jobs in the military that would not affect their reproductive health. As of today, only a few positions remain unavailable to women, mostly related to the handling of explosives, poisonous substances or to diving operations. Those changes have also reached the system of military education, long the exclusive preserve of men: in 2020, the share of women enrolled in military universities reached 13 per cent. “Women are now given the opportunity to receive a military education at any level, both in higher military educational institutions as well as in naval lyceums,” confirms the department of social and humanitarian support of the defence ministry. And while work remains to be done, the tangible benefits of the advocacy campaign are being felt across the ranks of the Ukrainian military.

In 2017 a documentary film, bearing the same name as the advocacy campaign, was produced and released. Narrated by three female directors, it examined the conditions of servicewomen fighting in Donbas through the stories of six of them; it was instrumental in bringing public attention to the difficulties they faced on the frontline.

A former sniper and Lieutenant, Olena Bilozerska, was one of the women featured in the documentary. A journalist by trade and member of the organisation Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), she had been training for years for the eventuality of an armed conflict against Russia. When war finally came, she left for Donbas and joined a volunteer unit with her husband and brothers-in-law.

“At the beginning of the war it was much easier for a woman who wanted to fight on the front line to do so in a volunteer unit than in the army,” Bilozerska said. “There, if a woman really wanted to fight, she achieved it rather quickly. The commanders understood that if they did not let her fight, she would leave, and the unit would lose a motivated fighter.” 

Tamara Martsenyuk is an associate professor of sociology at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and the academic coordinator of the 2015 study. According to her, the Armed Forces of Ukraine exhibited at the time of the study both “vertical and horizontal gender segregation”, while the empirical findings of the study (a survey of 42 women who were fighting or who had previously fought in Donbas) revealed major challenges. “Almost all respondents indicated that they encountered problems with their ability to make decisions in the army,” she told me. This is “largely because women were not included in the decision-making in the armed forces”.

This is an assessment which is shared by Oksana Iakubova, a now-retired Senior Lieutenant and former deputy commander of a mechanised battalion. She said that “in 2014 in the armed forces there were very few women in leadership positions in combat units on the front lines. I was the only woman in my battalion until 2016”.

To prove oneself

A pervasive culture of sexism in the armed forces meant that servicewomen constantly had to prove themselves worthy in order to be accepted as soldiers, and even more so as officers. “My male subordinates at first did not take me seriously, and would call me a girl,” Iakubova admitted. “It took a few battles for them to begin treating me as a commanding officer.” 

A senior soldier and machine gunner in the Military Law Enforcement Service, 39-year-old Yulia Sakhno also felt she had to impress her fellow soldiers in order to be taken seriously: “Men start to accept you as a soldier when they see that you do not whine, that you go shooting with everyone else, and that you can clean your gun without sparing your manicure. Only then do they show you more respect.”

The lack of access to combat and commanding positions and daily occurrences of sexist behaviour were not the only obstacles impeding the recruitment and integration of women in the armed forces. The researcher Martsenyuk noted that women faced “other day-to-day life issues which are rarely discussed by the government, including the lack of specialised health care for women, a lack of proper shoes and uniform sizes and unsatisfactory housing conditions,” concluding that the “infrastructure of the armed forces is only equipped for the needs of men and excludes from the army women’s specific needs.”

A situation experienced first-hand by Oksana Iakubova on the frontline confirms this. “In the trenches, you have to set aside your preferences and completely change your behaviour,” she told me. “At the front, in the dugouts, women do not have the opportunity to wash like the guys. There are even problems with the toilet.”

The issue of gender inequality in the armed forces, thrown into sharp relief by the war in Donbas, is nothing new, however. Arguably the most famous woman to ever serve in the Ukrainian army, Nadiya Savchenko, says that she also encountered considerable difficulties when trying to join the army: the only female soldier among Ukraine’s peacekeeping forces in Iraq, she made international headlines in 2014 when she was captured by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and subsequently brought to Russia to be tried for the murder of two Russian state-television journalists.

Slow changes

A defiant Savchenko was finally released as part of a prisoner exchange in 2016, and went on to become a member of Ukraine’s parliament. Looking back on her career, she doesn’t shy away from calling out the sexist attitudes she encountered: “I did face difficulties when trying to join the army, and those obstacles were faced by every woman. When I discussed with female instructors who had joined the army during the time of the Soviet Union, they told me it was the same at the time.”

According to her, transforming the mindset of male soldiers will prove harder than amending the legislative and institutional framework: “Changing the mentality is not as easy, and I think it might take many more generations. As a woman, you are always reminded that this is not a woman’s business.” However, she does believe that overcoming those difficulties has contributed to proving her worth as a soldier. “In some way, this constitutes your own professional selection. If you have a strong enough character to resist this, you are a good soldier. If you immediately give up, the army probably is not for you,” she added. 

Besides the laudable, if long-overdue, opening of combat positions to women, she also notes some cultural changes in recent years, including the kind of language employed within the armed forces. “Previously, we did not have feminitives, and your rank was referred to by its masculine name. But now, feminitives have been included in the official dictionary,” she said. “For example, as a woman officer, you are not addressed as Kapitan anymore, but as Kapitanka.” Those are small changes, but a testament to how far the army has come in addressing some of the issues pertaining to gender equality.

However, activists believe that much work remains to be done, including the taboo of gender-based and sexual violence. While some high-profile cases have contributed to raising awareness in recent years, Martsenyuk believes that a real reckoning still lays ahead. “Although such problems are not specific to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and sexual harassment occurs in other armies around the world, the situation in Ukraine is characterised by a lack of effective institutional mechanisms to prevent and combat sexual harassment,” she told me.

The story of Lieutenant Valeria Sikal is one important case in this regard. After experiencing sexual harassment for over a year by her commanding officer, she spoke out and became the first servicewoman to publicly denounce sexual abuse in the armed forces. She said that the local police refused to take her complaint seriously, while prosecutors initially rejected her written report. Unsurprising, according to Martsenyuk: “Women do not often report sexual harassment and discrimination, and almost never turn to the command or the police. In general, solving the problem of gender-based and sexual violence should be better addressed, and the Istanbul Convention should be ratified by Ukraine.”

According to the ministry of defence, a draft law that has recently been sent to the Cabinet of Ministers proposes, among other things, to better “regulate the response of commanding officers in cases of discrimination and sexual harassment among service members”, and adding to the list of military discipline obligations of servicemen the principle of “ensuring equal rights and opportunities for women, as well as preventing and combating discrimination and sexual harassment”.

In December 2018, Lt. Sikal filed a sexual harassment complaint with both military prosecutors and the police. As of today, the case is still under investigation. Her commanding officer, meanwhile, is still serving.

Guillaume Ptak is a freelance journalist from Bordeaux, France who works with France Télévisions as a web journalist. He travels to Ukraine on a regular basis covering political, economic and cultural subjects for different media outlets.

Armed Forces, Ukraine, Ukrainian army