CARDIFF, Wales – A documentary film about the important but under-publicized role of women in Ukraine’s armed forces went on a tour of prestigious British venues last week.
The 89-minute-long documentary in Ukrainian and Russian with English subtitles is called “Invisible Battalion” – a reference to the fact that many people in Ukraine know very little about the extensive part played by women at the front lines of the fight against invading Russian regular soldiers and Moscow-controlled “separatist” forces in Donbas.
The film emerged out of a 2016 sociology research project, partly funded by the United Nations Women organization which promotes gender equality and empowerment for women and the Ukrainian Women’s Fund.
The research project was coordinated by Mariya Berlinska, a former military volunteer. Berlinska volunteered to fly drones for the Ukrainian Army and train others to operate drones for surveillance of enemy positions. She is a founder of the Ukrainian Center for Aerial Reconnaissance in Kyiv and a winner of the Kyiv Post’s Top 30 Under 30 award.
Berlinska started the project to raise awareness about the role of women in Ukraine’s army and the volunteer battalions who helped halt the invasion by the Russian-separatist forces in the early stages of the war in 2014.
A trailer for the “Invisible Battalion,” a documentary featuring Ukrainian women soldiers. (YouTube/Ukrainian Women’s Fund)
The research project, also entitled “Invisible Battalion,” revealed that, concerning women, an old Soviet attitude still permeated the Ukrainian Army. When the war started, Ukrainian women by law were not allowed to take combat positions and were allowed near the front lines usually only as nurses and relegated to other non-combatant roles such as cooks, cleaners, and accountants.
Despite that, hundreds of women risked their lives alongside men volunteers bringing supplies to the fighters. Some joined volunteer battalions where rules weren’t as strict as in the regular army. And women also performed many front-line tasks in infantry, artillery and other regular units as well as working as snipers and reconnaissance specialists penetrating behind enemy lines.
But women’s participation in the fighting in Donbas happened in a legal no-man’s land where the majority were not officially enlisted and Soviet-era regulations forbade combat duties or even physically strenuous work, such as carrying anything weighing more than seven kilograms. Therefore, they were seldom paid or received less than men and, for the most part, did not qualify for the military benefits and social care given to male war veterans.
This inequality only changed for Ukrainian women in October, more than four years into the war, when the new legislation came into force that equalized women and men in the military.
Berlinska produced the film to use alongside the research in a campaign to lobby for gender equality changes in Ukraine’s Armed Forces and for Ukrainians to recognize the enormous role Ukrainian women have and are playing in the country’s defense.
The documentary tracks six women who have taken part in the war in Donbas. All are from different backgrounds and civilian professions but all served at the front lines. Two worked as military paramedics, two as snipers, one a special forces fighter and the sixth as one of the few women front line officers – a major.
The UK tour was arranged by a group called British-Ukrainian Aid (BUAid) in conjunction with the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain (AUGB), the country’s largest diaspora organization.
British-Ukrainian Aid’s spokesperson, Tetyana Vovnyanko, said the group was started in 2014 by some of the new wave of Ukrainian emigrants who came for work in the UK after their country’s independence in 1991.
Vovnyanko, who came to Britain 10 years ago from Uman, a city in Cherkassy Oblast, where she was psychology lecturer at a local university, said the aid group was established to help fighters with medical and other humanitarian aid, psychological rehabilitation, and to promote awareness in Britain about the war in Ukraine.
The group invited Berlinska and two of the women soldiers who were in the film, Andriana Susak, the special forces member and military paramedic and instructor Daria Zubenko, to Britain.
In November, the documentary was screened at various venues around the country including Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities, the AUGB Ukrainian Cultural Center in Edinburgh, the UK’s foremost forum for British and foreign journalists, The Frontline Club in London, and the Welsh Assembly (parliament) – with Berlinska and the two soldiers taking part in question and answer sessions after the film.
A prominent member of the ruling Labor Party at the Welsh Assembly, Mick Antoniw, who is himself of Ukrainian origin, arranged for the visitors to show their film at the parliament building. They also held meetings with members of the British parliament and visited the Military Academy in London.
“The purpose of the visit was not only to show the film,” Vovnyanko said, “but most importantly to deliver a message to the British audience about Russian occupation of the Eastern part of Ukraine and Crimea.”
She said the film is an important part of the advocacy campaign to focus the attention of Ukrainian society to women in the army, adding that almost 10,000 women served in volunteer battalions and continued in the regular forces.
“What appealed to British-Ukrainian Aid was that the project and the film brought the issue of equality of women in the army to the fore and has already helped to bring about some changes,” Vovnyanko said, referring to the October change in legislation that equalized men and women in the military.
Vovnyanko added that women are still almost absent from the higher echelons of the Ukrainian military. For instance, in October Ukraine got its first woman military general. The woman who got the rank, Liudmyla Shugaley, heads the medical directorate at the Security Service of Ukraine.
The two women soldiers, Susak and Zubenko, met in the city of Cardiff with members of all parties in the Welsh Assembly and the leader of the Welsh Government, First Minister Carwyn Jones.
“They are two remarkable women and impressive women whose visit to the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) was very moving,” Antoniw said. “One of them volunteered after (mass demonstrations at) the Maidan straight to front lines. They have both seen many of their friends killed and have direct knowledge of Russian soldiers because they have fought them.”
Ukrainian soldiers Andriana Susak (L) and Daria Zubenko (R) meet with members of the Welsh Assembly. (Askold Krushelnycky)
Antoniw added that the assembly members will be put together a cross-party letter of support to continue sanctions against Russia, recognize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and “correct the Kremlin’s propaganda to portray it as a civil war.”
The film was shown earlier in 2018 in the U.S. and Canada. The crew is planning to screen it in theaters in Ukraine as well.
