Mark Megahan
When the Russians invaded Ukraine, these hot babes put their clothes back on to do their patriotic duty while fighting for survival. Here at WB we’re dedicated to gratuitous sex, drugs and rock and roll. That doesn’t mean we can’t make a statement in support of the oppressed and endangered Ukrainian citizens at the same time. While the women in this NPR article may not be models in normal times, they just as well might have been. We salute them all.
Women of Ukraine stand up
As soon as Russian troops invaded the Ukraine border, 49-year-old mother of two Tanya Kobzar “decided to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps and enlist in the army.” For quite a while before the big invasion she had been having nightmares.
“I was waking up in the middle of the night, terrified. I would look at a black-and-white photo of my grandmother, which I have framed on a table. She reminds me of how brave a person can be.” Grandma was a medic during World War II. “It’s become part of the family lore — how brave she was, treating soldiers on the front lines.”
“I did this for my children and for my country,” she declares. Learning to fire a rifle was easier “than making borscht,” she laughs. Now, she’s deployed in Lviv, Ukraine, “teaching soldiers how to set up field hospitals.”
Other women are fighting on the front lines. “Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 are prohibited from leaving the country, and encouraged to fight,” NPR relates. Women can do as they please but are encouraged to take “up arms against the Russians — in this war, and in past ones.”
They say that “Ukrainian women have actually been serving in combat almost a century longer than American women.” The babes of Ukraine have proudly gone to battle since at least as far back as World War I.
“The Bolsheviks and the Communist parties, they declared equality between men and women in all the spheres, including the military,” feminist historian Oksana Kis points out.
Russia’s 2014 invasion
A few years ago, when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, “women enlisted here in the Ukrainian armed forces in huge numbers — and were officially recognized as combat veterans, with full military pensions.”
Back before they had conscription, “a quarter of Ukraine’s military was female.”
There are a bunch of iconic images of the current conflict, “on propaganda posters and on social media” of “female combatants.”
Locals say they are meant to serve as reminders for “the women who fought in the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, of female Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka in the early 2000s — and of Kurdish women fighting in Syria.”
“It’s very familiar iconography, when it comes to imagining a nation protecting herself — fighting for her independence and freedom,” Kis notes. Another female Ukraine resident who stood up for freedom is Alina Mykhailova. The 27-year-old “is a veteran of the 2014 war in eastern Ukraine who now serves on the Kyiv City Council.”
Since she re-enlisted she’s already seen heavy combat. “We just burned a Russian tank. Actually, not just one! We wiped out their entire position!” She had permission to reveal that to reporters. “Their tanks took a direct hit from our shells.“
