On both sides of Dokivska Street and the small park leading to the steps of the Unity church in Kyiv’s western Kotsyubyns’ke suburb, hundreds of men, women and children stood holding roses and carnations.
The only sound disturbing a recording of the sorrowful male voices in the folk song Plyve Kacha was that of the grief of Eleonora Maltseva’s mother, Iryna, awaiting a coffin in the shade of the maple and oak trees outside the large yellow-brick church.
Her daughter, known as Elya, a 34-year-old colonel in the Ukrainian army, a talented footballer and a mother to Tymofiy, 14, was one of 12 soldiers killed last week when a Russian jet bombed a five-storey apartment block in which she had been working in the town of Orikhove, in south-eastern Zaporizhzhia region, a staging post for Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Such was the turnout for her funeral, that the service had to be held outdoors. Dressed in black, with a shawl covering her hair, Iryna was beyond consolation, yet periodically she leaned forward in her chair as if anxious not to miss her daughter’s arrival. By her side, Tymofiy, a dark-haired, brown-eyed boy, in his smartest dark blue sleeveless shirt and freshly ironed jeans, appeared impassive, numb.
Then the hearse turned right from Dokivska Street and crept into view.
With a wail, Iryna lurched to her feet, trying to run to her daughter, fighting off those who tried to hold her back. “Let me see her,” she wailed as her small frame was engulfed by arms.
Tymofiy, suddenly overwhelmed, as if it had in an instant become real to him, fell into the left shoulder of his stepfather Mykola’s army uniform. The boy’s head stayed there throughout the open casket service as Mykola stroked his cheek and tenderly rubbed the back of his neck. Now, he visibly heaved with emotion.
More than 100 female Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion. Ukraine does not conscript women. Each of them volunteered for battle.
“She was a flame I followed, a bright flame that always did the right thing and we need more women like Elya in our army,” said a sergeant who had been asked to say a few words at the service. And yet, conceded a second soldier in an interview with the Guardian, while Maltseva was respected and listened to as an operations planner by those around her, “I can’t say the same for those at the higher command level”. “We have Nato standards but a Soviet system and mentality,” he added. If Elya had been listened to, he suggested, the soldiers would not have been there to die.
There are approximately 60,000 women serving in Ukraine’s armed forces, of which 5,000 are on the frontline. Ukraine’s ministry of defence makes much of the image of female and male defenders fighting together but based on interviews with the soldiers themselves and the organisations that help them, including the Veteranka women’s veterans body and the Zemliachky organisation, which has donated about $2m (£1.6m) in vital equipment, a picture has emerged that suggests a lack of respect for the points of view of its female personnel is one failure among many impeding the force’s fighting effectiveness.
It is a cause of frustration and anger for platoon sergeant Nadiya Haran, 27, who joined the army in 2017 as a radio technician. She had wanted to be a translator but until decree No 256 was revoked later that same year, women had been prevented in law from taking up senior roles, including those in combat positions.
There is equality on paper today but scant evidence of it in practice, Haran said, with women’s needs in terms of uniform, body armour, sanitation and career development not treated as priorities and regarded as almost a form of provocation by many men fighting alongside them.
“I would say we have to fight two enemies at once,” she said. “One being Russia, obviously. And the other one is the stereotypes and the stigma that you face every single day. And the only place that I can say I did not see that stigma was the actual ground zero [on the frontline] because everyone was so freaking busy fighting for their country.”
When it comes to uniforms, women must make do with wearing those designed for men, buy their own or seek a donation. Haran, who has been caught up among the heaviest fighting in places such as Bakhmut and Soledar in the Donetsk region, said she had been left with a knee injury as she had been unable to properly move around in her fatigues.
Body armour provided by the army is not designed for the female shape and so either constricts the chest or bulges out at the stomach, exposing the vital organs to damage.
Kateryna Myronchuck, 26, a senior lieutenant in 36 Brigade, who said she spent two years failing to get into the army because of her gender, had been forced to buy her own plates and jacket as the army issue was causing her back pain.
Then there is the problem of footwear. “It’s a very big problem to find the military boots with a smaller size for women,” said Olena Bilozerska, 44, a celebrated sniper with multiple kills to her name.
The list of shortcomings goes on: there is no contraception at the frontline nor the provision of female urinary diversion devices that allows women in trenches to stand up when relieving themselves so as to avoid infections.
Doctors in the field are not trained in gynaecology, and when a female soldier’s contract comes to an end they must undergo a medical examination to be re-enlisted in what many suspect is an attempt to ensure they are not pregnant and chasing paid leave.
But for all of those many indignities, each of the women said it was the mentality that most urgently needed to change. Haran, who recently transferred from her old unit after her formal complaints about the conduct of senior men went nowhere, said she had been told that “her place was in the kitchen” by a senior officer in her former brigade after returning from a successful rotation on the frontline. Many other women had the same experience, she said.
“Yesterday I had to talk to a girl, who knows I am a former gender adviser in the army, and she was put in a psychiatric facility without consent by her commander, just because she applied for transfer to a combat unit,” Haran said. “It’s that bad. And my former subordinate, a girl, a medic, she filed a sexual harassment report and there were witnesses [but] all [the] men refused to testify on her behalf and her commander threatened to put her in a facility as well, just for reporting that she was being sexually harassed.”
There are those contemptuous of the idea of women in the military, she said, and then are those who seek to exploit it.
“I left [my brigade] because there was this person high up the food chain who would harass women and I know these women,” she said. “Some of them are my subordinates who I’m responsible for. They were harassed by the same person who basically told them if they refuse to have sex with him, he’s sending their husbands who were also in the brigade to their deaths. I was told to shut up because he did not harass me personally.”
The defence ministry was invited by the Guardian to speak to Haran and investigate the claims but it did not immediately respond. There was every incentive to walk away, Haran said, but there was also a growing cohort of women in senior roles and the future Elya had been fighting for remained in sight. “Despite all of this stuff,” Haran said from a military base via Skype, “we’re fighting it off every day and we’re achieving something, we’re getting through this, we’re getting better.”
