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Ukraines first lady: Women bearing the brunt of the war

Valerya Tregubenko, a psychologist who works privately and for public health provider Clalit, and who has also been providing therapy to Ukrainians in Israel, says that seeking out help is far from a priority for the majority of those who have fled war. Local women working nearby exchanged wary looks when asked about the hotel. “There are always ‘those’ kinds of girls going inside,” one says, while the others nodded when asked if the place still rented rooms by the hour. “Of course, no one knew what kind of hotel this was,” says Gil Horev, a Welfare Ministry spokesman, referring to the fact that several Ukrainian refugees in wheelchairs were housed in the hotel, which had no provisions for people with disabilities.

A number of flashy cars were parked outside, in a part of Jerusalem ordinarily populated by construction workers and wholesalers. Responding to allegations that the hotel was a brothel, the Welfare Ministry says it still did not know if this was the case. Just a few days after the story came out in the Israeli press, the authorities found another hotel and moved everyone.

  • An initiative to extend the draft to women working in critical professions was due to be enacted last October, but it was postponed amid popular outcry.
  • Ukraine’s women soldiers are also often in the news, talking about their military experiences.
  • Mamo pracuj’s ambition is to provide Ukrainian women with multi-faceted support, from legal advice to psychosocial assistance.
  • Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human rights lawyer, is the director of Kyiv’s Centre for Civil Liberties, which shared the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
  • While exploitative individuals are not new, “the real problem is the policy,” says lawyer Anat Ben-Dor, clinical instructor at the Refugee Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University.
  • Like her colleagues “Phoenix” and “Oksana” , Sultan distinguished herself as a volunteer soldier in territorial defence units.

There also appeared new smaller teams such as Rodyna out of Kostopil in Volhynia and eastern Podollia teams around Uman. In 2008 there was introduced winter break competition which became regular later since 2013.

‘Life Had Not Prepared Me For It’

The organization left Ukraine because the leadership feared “for their lives and freedom”. Anna Malihon’s poem “Don’t Go Out for Water,” translated by Olena Jennings, speaks from the perspective of someone trapped in their shelter. The speaker, trapped in the shelter, is decreasing in size and strength. NELLE is an annual compilation that celebrates and publishes the best, most innovative writing by women, from fiction and poetry to creative nonfiction. Submissions to NELLE come from all over the United States and even internationally.

In the direction of Kherson, two plumes of gray smoke are visible in the distance. Usually at this time of year, Ivanova is busy organizing transport of wheat—the farm’s main export— to nearby ports on the Black Sea, where it will make its way to shops and bakeries around the world. But months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war has brought Ukraine’s ports to a near standstill, exacerbating an already growing global food crisis.

Women in the labor force

‘Even before the outbreak of the war we had issues with illegal employment and even cases of forced labour. Now given the scale of the crisis, we have a lot of concerns,’ Koćwin said. Aleksander Palikot is an Ukraine-based journalist covering politics, history, and culture. His work has appeared in Krytyka Polityczna, New Eastern Europe, Jüdische Allgemeine, and beyond. Now, with the legal discrimination gone mainly due to advocacy and pressure from civil society, multiple problems remain, and new ones emerge.

Health

But Ukraine’s women soldiers are increasingly being accepted by Ukrainian society and the country’s political leadership during this war. Thousands of women have voluntarily joined Ukraine’s armed forces since 2014, when Russia’s occupation of Crimea and territories in eastern Ukraine began. Over the past nine years, the number of women serving in the Ukrainian military has more than doubled, with another wave of women joining after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. “The Ukrainian military has tried to adopt more equal policies, but those have faced pushback from Ukrainian society, which largely sees women’s place in society as guardians of the home and family,” political science professor says. Headlines about the prominence of Ukrainian women on the front lines of war are misleading, said Jessica Trisko Darden, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at VCU’s College of Humanities and Sciences. “The Ukraine war echoes a global pattern where national militaries accept women in larger numbers than in the past — yet relegate women to roles that distance them from front-line combat,” she wrote in a recent column in The Washington Post.

In some cases, the women’s dire economic situation, coupled with the trauma of war, snowballs into the worst possible outcomes. When Svetlana followed up with the help of former MK Ibtisam Mara’ana as to why, the police said she was welcome to appeal the decision by providing further evidence. By then, Svetlana, severely traumatized, said she had no strength to continue with the investigation. She has since left Israel for “a country that accepts refugees,” according to Udovichenko. Svetlana is one of over 47,000 Ukrainians — the vast majority of them women — who traveled to Israel since the start of the invasion but who are not eligible for citizenship under Israel’s Law of Return, according to Israel’s Welfare Ministry. Of these, only approximately 15,000 currently remain in Israel, with the rest having chosen to leave. Not a single Ukrainian check here on https://www.thegirlcanwrite.net/ fleeing the war has been accorded refugee status by Israel.