Ukraine occupies a unique place for disinforming the socially constructed role of women. History’s greatest woman sniper was Ukrainian yet the media emphasis on the migration of refugees is the separation of couples at the border into Ukrainian males being conscripted into the armed forces as women and children flee to neighboring counties. Not only are familial roles so constrained as 57,000 women serve in the armed forces plus many female civilians have been issued firearms should resistance require them.
The difference between a modern Ukraine and a traditional one can be observed as Viktor Yanukovych waits in Minsk for the cessation of hostilities. For some Ukrainians, women shouldn’t be in combat, as Yanukovych refused to debate his female opponent prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko and justified it by saying that "a woman's place is in the kitchen".[55][56]
The reality is more interesting below as a Ukrainian woman curses a Russian soldier in a city that has the kind of folkloric images that are rooted in 19th Century literature but was applied to many women soldiers during World War Two. The tweet could even be staged, but even if it is, the message of resistance has residual meaning even if the vehicle is disinformative.
The defeat of Russians goes much farther back than the hegemonic image of cultures meant to be subordinate to Russia, and the mythology of women soldiers while objectified in some images remains embedded in Ukrainian history. The history of this war is also an intersectional one considering the status of refugees and non-citizen Ukrainians such as international students in the population displaced by the war.
The Battle of Konotop or Battle of Sosnivka was fought between a coalition led[19] by the Hetman of Ukrainian Cossacks Ivan Vyhovsky and cavalry units of the Russian Tsardom under the command of Semyon Pozharsky and Semyon Lvov, supported by Cossacks of Ivan Bezpaly,[6] on 29 June 1659, near the town of Konotop, Ukraine, during the Russo-Polish War (1654–1667). Vyhovsky's coalition defeated the Russians and their allies and forced the main Russian army to interrupt the siege of Konotop. However, the result of the battle only intensified political tensions in Ukraine and led to Vyhovsky's removal from power several months later.
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Apparently the Russian invasion plans last year were leaked to the Germans, published in the London tabloid The Sun, and reproduced in the NY Post. Like most Rupert Murdoch media, women can be reduced to articulated versions of page 3 girls. Women solders have become romanticized in highly traditional ways even as the context and history is much greater.
Lyudmila Mikhailovna (Belova) Pavlichenko.
World War II Soviet Union Army Soldier. She was one of the famed Russian female snipers from World War II, and was responsible for the death of 36 German snipers (one of whom had 500 kills). She is considered the greatest female sniper of all time. Her total kills were officially numbered at 309.
en.wikipedia.org/...
Ludmila Pavlichenko' war Movie Review from Dota Classic on Vimeo.
Ukrainian MP, Kira Rudik, has told ITV News that she will bear arms and fight for her country.
Rudik is the leader of Ukraine's Voice Party, the opposition to Volodymyr Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party which is currently in power.
The MP joined Ukraine's political spectrum in 2019, championing the right for the country to be a state for the people, peace and security.
Once a critic of Zelenskyy's politics, Rudik says she now firmly stands behind him as he is doing 'what a president should do'.
She spurred international reaction overnight on Friday, after posting a picture of herself holding a Kalashnikov rifle on Twitter.
www.itv.com/…
There are 57,000 women serving in the Ukrainian armed forces. Ukraine has been employing women in its military since 1993. The participation of women in the army is 15 percent. A total of 1100 women are posted as military officers..
Ukraine expanded military conscription to include all women “fit for military service” between the ages of 18 and 60 as threats with Russia rose.
The edict from Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense in December 2021 means that in the event of a major war, this female reserve can be mobilized as part of the national reserve to serve in a broad range of military specialties.
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Women make up around 10 percent of the Ukrainian armed forces, according to the Christian Science Monitor. Those who are serving in combat positions won that right, officially, only in 2016.
Two years earlier, when Russian-backed separatists launched a terrorist campaign, women took up arms and scrambled to the fight. They worked as snipers and combat medics and soldiers to defend their homes in a time of crisis. But because the military did not officially employ women in those positions, they were never listed in military records as snipers and combat medics and soldiers.
Instead, records referred to them as seamstresses, or cooks, or cleaners. When these women left the military, they had fought the same fight as the men and carried the same emotional scars—but received no recognition, no commensurate support.
It’s a situation that was depicted—and, in part, corrected by—a documentary from a group of sociologists and activists who called themselves Invisible Battalion. The documentary, which came out in 2017 and is also called Invisible Battalion, profiled six female soldiers and veterans who fought in the Ukrainian military and had yet to be officially recognized for it.
It shows some of the women in the trenches in Donbas, in southeastern Ukraine, and some preparing other soldiers for combat or waiting anxiously for their next deployment. Other women in the film are shown grappling with lingering trauma in their lives after service. Many of those followed by the documentary feel a powerful kinship with the men they fought alongside; they want access to military careers and benefits and to argue for their rightful place in history.
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The larger cultural issue is more than gender and remains as one where Ukraine is seen as subordinate to Russia, much to the chagrin of a 21st Century nation. Apparently, unlike the current bilingual president Zelensky, the puppet apparent, Yanukovych still has trouble speaking Ukrainian.
Within the Slavic language group, Russian is in fact the odd one out. If you could have heard an ancient East Slavic tribesman, his speech would have sounded much more like Ukrainian than Russian. Indeed, Ukrainian shares many more linguistic features with Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish and Serbo-Croat than it does with Russian. Ukrainian and Russian are not mutually intelligible – the standard linguistic test for determining whether a language is a fully-fledged language in its own right, and not a dialect of another. While many people in Ukraine have Russian as their first language, most people are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian, and will switch languages depending on who they are speaking to. Politics aside, the language issue has never been problematic in Ukraine.
www.stopfake.org/...