Masha is well-known in Ukraine now. It’s the sort of fame that people gained quickly and unexpectedly for themselves when the Maidan had just finished and the war was just starting. Between Viktor Yanukovych fleeing the country and the new presidential elections, activists and volunteers replaced the state and in many ways turned out to be more efficient than the government. Volunteers collected everything that the army needed, demanded punishment for those who had shot at civilians during the protests, and many joined the army and went to the front.
Masha did everything she could during the protests. She made Molotov cocktails and gave speeches on gender equality. After experiencing discrimination from male protesters, she secured permission to talk about equal rights from the Maidan’s central stage. Eventually, late in the evening when the stage was finally free, as she was about to be given the microphone, several men stopped her and said:
“You know, what I have between my legs, and what you have between your legs are two different things. You should do what you do well: borscht, sewing.”
Masha was having none of that. She went up on the stage and delivered her speech. As it turned out, it was the first of many about women’s rights.
When the war started, Masha packed up and went to the front. She taught herself to fly drones and then set up an organisation that taught others to fly them. She argued that in the 21st century we should not be fighting with people, we should use technology. And it’s not as if the Ukrainian army lacked technology. Volunteer organisations like Masha’s, the Ukrainian diaspora all over the world and western governments provided a steady supply of drones for the army. But a combination of untrained soldiers, overly cautious officers and corrupt generals meant that sometimes these drones either never made it to the frontline, or ended up somewhere in storage to make sure that they didn’t get broken. As Masha pointed out, some officers in charge were worried about being told off by superiors for damaging army property. Damaging people was less risky, it seems.
Masha wanted to change all this. She organised free training courses for others and flew drones herself at the front. She enjoyed the best of both worlds: she went to the frontline every few months and felt like she was making a contribution to the war effort. But she didn’t sign an official contract with the army and thus couldn’t be totally controlled by it. The state also benefited from this situation: it had someone who provided free training, drones and risked her own life at the front. If something happened, the state bore no responsibility. In Masha’s flat, on Masha’s desk, there was a pile of requests from various army units asking her to train their personnel – for free, of course.
I admired her determination. But I also realised that the more Masha and people like her did the job of defending the state, something that should have been done by the professional military, the more the state would feel that it needed to do nothing. When I reproached her for enabling the state to take a passive role while the volunteers did the hard work, she asked me how her stopping flying drones or training others would help the people at the frontline. When I told her to be careful with her friendships with radical nationalists, because, after all, they tend to see feminists as a threat to national security and are the most ardent supporters of patriarchy and gender discrimination, which she so passionately tried to fight against, she replied that there were only two categories of people at the frontline: decent people and arseholes. Nationalists could be found in both camps; she tried not to hang out with the arseholes. When I tried to persuade Masha to take a break from saving Ukraine and look after her health, she smiled in response and said she would. I wasn’t convinced by any of these answers.
In her attempt to help those at the frontline, she tried to have the laws on army recruitment changed in order to stop (or at least minimise) discrimination of women. When Masha first started to go to the war zone, she noticed that women were doing everything from kitchen duties to taking part in combat and were often responsible for both at the same time. Because of restrictions in recruitment law, the majority of army positions – and not only combat ones – were inaccessible to women. As a result, female snipers were registered as administrators and female combat fighters as seamstresses. The state again was happy to use people’s willingness to risk their lives at no expense to its budget.
These women were completely unprotected when it came to frontline injuries: how do you explain a firearm wound received by an administrator? They were not remunerated adequately, because you don’t pay a seamstress additional money for participating in combat. The status they enjoyed was nowhere near that of their male colleagues. Indeed, if things went very wrong and a servicewoman with a semi-legal status was killed, her family would get no compensation. The woman could be blamed for going to the frontline out of her own choice; she should have known that it’s “no place for women”. And, of course, they were vulnerable to frequent sexual harassment and violence from their own men, not to mention the enemy if they were unlucky enough to be captured.
Masha wanted to change all this too. Like flying drones, she thought she could do it from within the army. I told her that you couldn’t reform such a patriarchal institution from inside, because you would only legitimise it by joining it. She disagreed. We had many heated discussions after which I sometimes thought that she would never speak to me again. Other times she found my arguments persuasive. Despite my scepticism she persevered: she lobbied the Ministry of Defence, encouraged women veterans and servicewomen to demand their rights, and became an outspoken critic of the military as an institution while supporting the frontline daily. And her efforts paid off. The discriminatory laws were altered as a result of the campaign she had started and led. She did not achieve gender equality in the army, but she made a vital first step towards it.
When I called Masha to say that my brother, Volodya, had been killed while serving in the Ukrainian army in the Donbas region, she happened to be at the front. She said that she’d go to the unit where he had served to pick up his stuff and bring it to me. On her way back from Luhansk oblast, her car broke down. A walking stick in one hand – she was suffering from an injured leg – my brother’s belongings in the other, she boarded train after train and eventually made it to Kyiv. A few days later, when I arrived in Kyiv from Lviv after my brother’s funeral, we sat in her little kitchen in an old Soviet-style apartment and went through my brother’s things together. There, on her kitchen floor, lay my brother’s life of the past two years, and we had to sift through it piece by piece.
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Olesya Khromeychuk | Radio Free (2020-10-14T00:00:00+00:00) On the edge of a European war, who gets to defend the state?. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/14/on-the-edge-of-a-european-war-who-gets-to-defend-the-state/
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