Women’s Resistance during Wartime: The Case of Ukraine

Women play a prominent role in the armed struggles for national independence and democratic change. Yet, women’s participation in war is often marginalized in the mass media and political science literature. This study uses the case of the Russia-Ukraine war to identify multiple ways in which women participate in the country’s resistance to the aggressor state. In the spring of 2014, the Russian Federation annexed Crimea and occupied a part of eastern Ukraine. More recently, in February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which turned into the largest ground war in Europe since World War II. To date, tens of thousands of people have been killed, and millions of Ukrainians became internally displaced persons or sought refuge abroad. Drawing on media interviews with Ukrainian women, the study uncovers diverse forms of women’s resistance. Like women during World War II, Ukrainian women during the Russia-Ukraine War are a big part of the war as combatants and civilians. First, the share of servicewomen in the Armed Forces of Ukraine increased from 16,557 in 2013 to 41,000 in 2022. Women took up combat positions and served as snipers, drone operators, and paramedics on the front lines. Second, women fought on the home front by crowdsourcing resources for the military and providing aid for internally displaced persons and war veterans. In particular, the Ukrainian Women Veteran Movement pressed for gender equality in the military and raised funds for the provision of equipment, uniforms, and other supplies for female soldiers. Third, women counteracted Russia’s information warfare through the documentation of war crimes, journalism, public-facing scholarship, and the development of cultural products in defense of Ukrainian culture and national identity. Moreover, women’s migration is a survival strategy aimed at resisting Russia’s policy of annihilating ethnic Ukrainians. Taken as a whole, the study underscores the resilience of Ukrainians and contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship on women’s experiences of the war. In addition, the empirical analysis speaks to an academic debate about the contestation of dominant gender norms during wartime.