More and more women are taking up combat roles on the front line, playing a key role a year on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But this hasn’t always been the case.
All military roles available to men were only opened to women last year, with a wave of new recruits joining after the February 2022 invasion.
Gender-inclusive reforms in 2018 gave women the same legal status as men in the armed forces and ended bans on women holding 450 different occupations in Ukraine — including welding, firefighting and many defence roles — in an attempt to abolish Soviet-era stereotypes maintaining that some work was damaging to reproductive health.
