Loss, defiance, and the fight for justice: The stories of three women from Ukraine

Having ensured that the parcel was as waterproof as possible, I returned the tape and scissors to the receptionist, jumped in a taxi, and headed to the Lychakiv Cemetery, the main burial ground of the city of Lviv, my hometown. When Russia began its war against Ukraine in 2014, the military section of the cemetery was expanded with the graves of the new war dead. I’m very familiar with the large, granite crosses featuring photos of the fallen and a golden engraving, reading, “To the Eternal Memory of the Hero”. One of them bears the name and photo of my brother, Volodya, killed in action in 2017. His grave is the first and the last place I visit on my trips to Ukraine. In fact, every spare moment I have, I spend there. It’s the only place where the wound in my heart bleeds a little less.

This time, however, when the taxi dropped me off at the cemetery, I didn’t go to my brother’s grave. I headed over to an adjacent area with an apt name: the Field of Mars. The Soviets buried their military dead there after they had annexed western Ukraine in the aftermath of the Second World War. Before that, this field had contained the remains of soldiers of the Austrian army, killed in the First World War. When Russia escalated its war against Ukraine in February 2022, the dead were too great in numbers to be contained in the military cemetery where my brother is laid to rest. They had to be buried in the Field of Mars. It is now home to hundreds of new graves – and counting – making this spill over plot larger than the original cemetery.

As I approached the field, I was overwhelmed by the number of new graves since my last visit just a few months earlier, and the sea of flags and burning candles beside them. I was meant to deliver the package I carried to one of them. I didn’t know the man who was buried there. I knew his first name was Andrii; I also knew his last name because it was the same as his sister’s, although I didn’t know her personally either. One night, while watching the news at home in London, I saw her being interviewed beside her brother’s grave and recognised the location: the Field of Mars in my hometown. I also recognised the way she was feeling. She said she would never forgive Russia for her brother’s premature death.

The package I was delivering was for Natalia, a fellow grieving sister. My book, The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister, had just come out in Ukrainian and I wanted her to have it, hoping that it might soothe her pain at least a little or, failing that, remind her that she was not alone. I decided that on my next visit home, I would leave the book — wrapped in as much plastic as the autumn weather called for — where I knew she would find it: her brother’s final resting place. When I located Andrii’s grave, I discovered it was overflowing with flowers. Reassured that Natalia must visit often, I tucked my book in between the bouquets together with a message apologising for my intrusion into her grief.

Around 80% of Ukrainians know someone who has been either killed or injured while fighting Russia’s war of aggression since February 2022. In addition to the military losses, there are mounting civilian casualties from Russia’s relentless strikes on schools, kindergartens, hospitals and ordinary residential buildings. Whole communities have been destroyed. Mariupol, Bakhmut, Popasna, Rubizhne, Avdiivka are now ghost towns. Almost 4 million. individuals are internally displaced, and over 6 million Ukrainians have sought refuge globally. Many have lost contact with their loved ones. PTSD and other types of trauma are widespread and will pose a challenge not only for war veterans but for the whole of society. Ukraine is a country that is drowning in grief. But the grief only fuels the fight.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces are the embodiment of an alliance between society and the military. The army relies on the hard work of a vast volunteer movement to fill gaps in procurement. Friends and families of those who serve regularly raise funds for various items, ranging from drones to first aid kits. The army also relies on civilians for its new recruits. Therefore, a military death often means the death of someone who was a civilian only yesterday. High losses in the army mean that more civilians will have to take up arms tomorrow.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces are a citizen army; a large proportion of it consists of people from all walks of life who either voluntarily joined up or were drafted for service during different waves of mobilisation since 2014 and especially after February 2022. These men and women took up arms not as a professional choice, but out of sheer necessity and a sense of duty to their country. They gave up their civilian lives to protect the lives of their loved ones, and to ensure that Ukrainians could choose the democratic future they had been building, rejecting the one their authoritarian occupier wishes to impose upon them.

In the interview Natalia gave beside her brother’s grave, she said that she had tried to prevent him from joining up, but he had insisted on fighting. She tried to protect him, but he died while protecting his country. I don’t know if Natalia found my book. If she did, I can only hope that it gave her some solace.

‘Mum, remember when we were a family and when we loved each other?’ Andriana Arekhta, a special unit sergeant in the Ukrainian Armed Forces relayed a conversation she had with her son. During an interview for a BBC documentary, she struggled to hold back her tears. It had been months since she held her little boy. At the time of the interview, Andriana was convalescing in a military hospital, following severe injuries sustained in action. Her unit did not have an armoured vehicle and was relying on a civilian car, sourced by volunteers. So when she drove over a landmine near Kherson in 2022, she didn’t have the protection that an armoured vehicle would provide and was lucky to have survived the blast.

Andriana is well known in Ukraine as one of the founders of the Women’s Veteran Movement. She has been demonised by Russia as a ‘Nazi executioner’, a Second World War term used by the Soviets to describe the Nazi death squads. I know Andriana as a shy but utterly determined woman. I met her in 2018 when she came to the UK to promote Invisible Battalion, a documentary film about the lives of women on the frontlines. During this period, many around the globe had become convinced by Kremlin propaganda about an ‘internal conflict’ in eastern Ukraine and were influenced to regard Russia as a mediator for peace rather than a perpetrator of war. The servicewomen, therefore, had to do some basic explaining about the war, its origins and potential future escalation, before they were able to talk about the gendered nature of their service.

Andriana was a perfect ambassador for this purpose: she joined a volunteer battalion straight after the Maidan protests in 2014 when it became clear that it wasn’t enough to defend democracy on the barricades; it had to also be defended on the battlefield. She served as a shock trooper but was formally registered in the Ukrainian Armed Forces as a seamstress. The paternalistic legacy of the Soviet labour law prevented women from accessing a vast majority of army occupations. However, the need for all professions at the front was immense, and women were placed in whatever jobs needed to be done, even if on paper, their involvement was limited to gendered roles.

In addition to the documentary, ‘Invisible Battalion’ became a powerful advocacy campaign spearheaded by a group of women veterans and feminist scholars. They assessed the precarious position of women in the armed forces and lobbied for the law to be amended. The result was astonishing: not only was the law revised, the efforts of the activists also drew attention to the gendered perception of service in Ukraine. In the early years of the war, media coverage seemed to oscillate between sensationalising women who ‘followed their men to the trenches’, and demonising the ones who ‘should have known that war was no place for women’. ‘Invisible Battalion’ activists challenged such misrepresentations and insisted on judging women in the military by their accomplishments rather than their gender. Through their efforts, they succeeded in gradually altering both media depictions and societal attitudes toward servicewomen.

Andriana was among those active in the campaign. While fighting against obstacles that prevented her and her fellow servicewomen from serving unhindered by structural and habitual discrimination, she realised that her biggest adversary was the misogynistic enemy. Aware of the numerous accounts of torture and sexual violence against women in Russian captivity, Andriana chose her nom-de-guerre carefully. She was known as ‘Malysh’ (‘Kid’). Using the noun in masculine form meant that if communication mentioning her was intercepted by the Russians or their proxies, they would not suspect the fighter to be a woman.

The Russian army uses rape as a method of warfare. The extent of conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated by Russian troops became clear to the world in 2022, following the liberation of the occupied regions of Ukraine, which exposed the magnitude of the crimes. Ukrainians knew what to expect from the escalation of the war. They were aware that their fellow citizens in occupied Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine had been deprived of all basic rights by the occupying authorities for years. That is why, following the full-scale invasion, not only men but thousands of women joined the armed forces. Some were motivated by the need to be armed should the enemy approach their homes, while others felt a strong sense of duty to defend their country. Whatever their reasons for joining the ranks, as of October 2023, over 62,000 women were enlisted in the Ukrainian army; over 43,000 of them were servicewomen. The other nearly 20,000 occupied administrative and medical roles among many others. In contrast to the presence of women in the Ukrainian armed forces in 2014, there has been an almost 25% overall increase, with the number of servicewomen more than doubling.

Having taken her son to safety in February 2022, Andriana re-joined the military. ‘I’ve lost more than 100 friends. I don’t even know how many phone numbers I need to delete’, she told the BBC crew. ‘They took the best years of my life’, she adds. ‘They even took my dreams.’ In spite of her grave injuries, Andriana is determined to make a full recovery and return to the front. She is determined to go on fighting, so her son won’t have to.

In public discussions, I am frequently asked why Ukrainians are so focused on achieving victory and justice rather than ceasefire and peace. Living under Russian occupation with its torture chambers, arbitrary imprisonments and mass graves would not bring peace. Despite being the ones losing their citizens, Ukrainians remain determined to fight for as long as it takes. This question typically comes from individuals who do not understand that Moscow is a repressive imperialist power that is not interested in playing by the rules of a democratic order. In order to maintain at least an appearance of its imperial might, it has to constantly expand its borders, turning sovereign states in its neighbourhood into a buffer zone. The only way to secure peace with Russia is to defeat it.

So far, Russia has gotten away with perpetrating heinous crimes not only in Ukraine but also in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and other parts of the world where its mercenaries operate. It has benefited from the impunity granted to it by world leaders who continued to trade with the aggressor and thus facilitate its ability to wage wars. The testimonies of those who record Russian war crimes and speak out against its impunity are vital if we are to break the pattern of aggression and bring the perpetrators to justice. That is why the invading Russian army was equipped with a hit-list of activists when it staged the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

‘The occupying Russian troops brought not only parade uniforms with them at the beginning of the invasion but they also brought body bags’, said Ukrainian author Victoria Amelina, while being interviewed at Hay Festival Cartagena in January 2023. ‘They expected to take Ukraine in three days, and we are pretty sure that those body bags were for writers, for mayors, for people whom we see tortured and murdered on the occupied territories’, she added.

In June 2023, Victoria was killed in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant. Following her death, her colleagues at PEN Ukraine started a project centred on people of culture who have been killed in Russia’s war. Victoria’s story is now included in their sombre database.

A novelist, poet and children’s book writer, Victoria trained herself to become an investigator of war crimes following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. She travelled around the liberated territories and spoke to survivors of the Russian occupation. She was determined to document their testimonies of war crimes. Because lies thrive on untold truths. Victoria wrote that when stories such as those of the Holocaust or the Holodomor ”are not fully revealed, we’re bound not to trust each other. Who were you? The hungry one or the one taking all the food in 1933? (…) The scared one watching from the window when Jews were taken away or the one who took them (in)?”

The questions Victoria posed remain relevant today. Who were we in 2014? The ones who tolerated Russia’s aggression and turned a blind eye to the violation of international law in the middle of Europe or the ones who pushed against Russia’s impunity? Who were we in 2022? The ones who claimed Ukraine would fall in three days or the ones who campaigned to provide it with all it needed to withstand the attack? Who will we be as this war continues: the ones who will insist on a ceasefire that will bring more body bags with the next wave of invasion? Or will we be the ones who will stay invested in Ukraine’s victory so that its people can see justice and begin to heal?

Natalia, Andriana and Victoria represent the experiences of many Ukrainians. The shared trauma from increasing losses, the unwavering determination for victory and the yearning for justice as the key to lasting peace are prevalent throughout Ukrainian society. What is lacking is trust in the democratic world: is it prepared to do all it takes to see Ukraine succeed and thus protect democracy globally?

From the Field of Mars, I went to visit Victoria’s grave. She is also buried in the Lychakiv Cemetery. I brought with me a bouquet I received after a talk at a book festival. She should have been at that festival too. She should have received flowers from her readers too. I left my bouquet on her grave and went to the military pantheon to pay respects to my brother. It’s the only place where the wound in my heart bleeds a little less.