Themes by tag: women

Oksana Vinnik, 56, an agronomist by profession, was born in the Lviv region but moved to Volyn almost 40 years ago. She has 4 adult children and 8 grandchildren. With the full-blown war outbreak, Oksana turned to volunteering: cooking borscht and dumplings for the military in her kitchen and sending the food to the front line.

Later, she saw an advertisement by Volyn Territorial Defense Brigade looking for people to fill various positions, including a cook. It hit Oksana that this offer was right for her. Nobody but Oksana’s husband knew about her decision to mobilize, but she told her children and grandchildren after she received her military ID.

Oksana is currently stationed in the Lyman area, where she and a team of cooks prepare home-cooked meals for soldiers, including those who have been wounded at the front.

• food
• military
• women

Lerane Khaibulaieva is a Crimean Tatar who was born in Uzbekistan, where the soviet authorities deported her family from Crimea. Lerane returned to the peninsula as a child. And in 2016, after russia’s occupation of Crimea, she was forced to leave her home. She settled in Kyiv region. In 2022, she fled Irpin, which the russians were trying to assault at the time.

In Crimea, Lerane worked as a journalist covering economic topics. However, the woman always dreamed of creating a family cafe. She opened a small café serving chebureki in Kyiv region, and later a cafe in the suburbs of the capital. In Lviv, which became Lerane’s fourth home, she again returned to doing her favorite thing and founded Crimean Yard cafe.

Her own business helps the woman support her son, who is still in school, as well as her husband, a veteran who fought the anti-terrorist operation and defended Ukraine during the full-scale invasion. He is now back from the front line due to a disability. Lerane says that she dreams to move one more time – to Crimea, liberated from the russians.

• casualties
• food
• occupation
• women
• Lviv

When the full-scale war began, Anna Dovzhenko was in Lviv. The woman planned to return to her native Kharkiv as soon as it got safe there. However, the apartment of Anna’s family was partially destroyed by enemy shelling, so she had to rebuild her life in Lviv region. Anna became interested in quail breeding because she read that quail eggs supposedly help to cope with radiation poisoning. This information led her to starting her own business.

First, Anna and her family bought 200 quail eggs, from which her first birds hatched. Anna’s husband built quail cages with his own hands, set up water supply and ventilation systems. The woman says that when she’s near the quails her mood improves. Work helps Anna deal with anxiety as well as support the family financially. The entrepreneur has already managed to acquire  regular customers. She donates some of the eggs to other refugees, as well as to a family-type orphanage.

• women
• Lviv

Daria is a native of Pavlohrad in the Dnipro region (today the city often suffers from Russian shelling). Before the full-scale war, she lived in Kotsiubynske, Kyiv region. In the first days of Russia’s war on Ukraine, to the sound of explosions heard as the enemy state unleashed attacks, she left the town with her boyfriend. For some time they lived in a village in the Vinnytsia region. They returned home when the Ukrainian army retook the Kyiv region.

Before the full-scale war outbreak, she worked as a cook, administrator, and cashier in restaurants, but after returning, she thought about starting her own business from the ground up. Daria also wanted it to help people find work. 

She decided to open a sushi bar and applied for a government grant program. She managed to win it on the fourth attempt. With these funds (160 thousand hryvnias), she covered 90% of the launching costs. Today, her sushi bar restaurant is a very popular place in Kotsiubynske. And Daria plans to run another one.

• women

Originally from Donetsk, Tetiana Tipakova lived in Berdiansk, Zaporizhia region (currently Russian-occupied), for about 30 years. Before Russia’s all-out invasion, she worked in a travel agency.

Since the full-blown war’s early days, Tetiana assembled peaceful protests in support of Ukraine in Berdiansk. Eventually, she was abducted by the Russian military for leading the actions. They put a bag over her head and took her to a colony, where she was interrogated for two days and beaten. Tetiana was subjected to electric shocks through her fingers and Russian captors mocked her execution. She was also forced to record an apology video. The prisoner was released, but the next day she was captured again. This time, she was held for 4 days and again had to endure torture.

After that, Tatiana decided to flee the city. She traveled through more than 20 checkpoints to get to the city of Zaporizhia. There she later founded the Ridna Stezhka NGO to support her fellow countrymen who were also forced out of the occupied city. They help people with food and medicine insecurity and organize leisure activities. They also help the military from the Berdiansk community. “Our heart is forever yellow and blue” is a tagline linked with the organization. 

There is an opportunity for journalists to hold offline and online interviews with Tetiana. 

• occupation
• prisoners
• russian crimes
• women

As a civilian, Olha Rukavishnikova is a violinist. She started music education at the age of four and in the eighth grade, she took up conducting and performed in particular at the Mykolaiv Regional Philharmonic and the Kyiv Conservatory Great Hall. On February 24, 2022, at 8 a.m., Olha was standing ready at the local military registration and enlistment offices. She was issued a firearm by the evening of that day and used it for the first time against the enemy the next day. Now Olha is fighting in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, her main weapon is a hand-held RPG-7 anti-tank grenade launcher, but she also works with a sniper rifle, an automatic easel grenade launcher, a machine gun, and a mortar.

During one of her combat missions, Olha sustained a blast injury to her cervical vertebrae. This exposure to an explosion also resulted in eye loss. Despite this, she refused to be discharged from military service. Now she is performing active military duty at the front line area again.

The servicewoman is ready to talk to the media online by prior arrangement.

• culture
• military
• women

Women who have fallen into difficult life circumstances due to the war have almost completed driving courses in Kyiv. These are the first courses like this in Ukraine. They started in September last year. 15 women joined the pilot project. Among the participants are those who were forced to leave their homes due to russia’s full-scale invasion.

The women have already passed the theoretical part of the exam and are completing the practical part. After successful training, they will be able to obtain a category B license and have the opportunity to become mobile and independent. 

• casualties
• women
• Kyiv

Anna Chepynoha is a third-year student at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. In July 2023, 20-year-old Anna joined the separate UAV service in the Ukrainian Volunteer Army. Already in August, the military woman started going on combat missions in the Zaporizhia direction. Anna continues to study: combines her service with online lectures and university seminars. The woman says that sometimes she must get in touch with her university right while being at the positions, in the break between performing combat tasks. Anna does not plan to take an academic leave from the university. Currently, she serves as a navigator and plans to become a drone operator.

For reference: Anna Chepynoha is at the front lines. She is ready to communicate with journalists, both online and offline, by prior arrangement.

• military
• women

Liudmyla Chepizhko, owner of a beauty salon in Solomianskyi district of Kyiv. The woman opened the establishment during the all-out Russian invasion.

On the morning of January 2, 2024, Russians attacked Kyiv with missiles. The explosion shattered windows and damaged walls in Liudmyla’s salon. Luckily, there were no people at the moment when the strike hit, so there were no those injured. The very next day, Liudmyla boarded up the broken windows with plywood and reopened the salon for business.

• reconstruction
• russian crimes
• women
• Kyiv

Olena Zinova is an entrepreneur from Kherson. For more than 20 years, the woman has run her own shop and sold embroidered Ukrainian shirts, towels, jewelry and souvenirs with Petrykivka painting. When the enemy occupied Olena’s hometown in 2022, she had to carefully hide all things with Ukrainian symbols and close the store, because the russians were looking for and destroying everything that was even remotely connected to Ukraine. Olena had lived under the occupation for three months, when she finally decided to leave and take a collection of embroidered shirts and the Ukrainian flag with her. Together with her family, the woman managed to pass through 33 russian roadblocks, even though each one could be the last, Olena says.

The entrepreneur’s family settled in Kryvyi Rih, Dnipropetrovsk region, where she immediately began to rebuild her business. Olena made another shop from scratch, had renovations done there and bought equipment to replace what she had had to leave in Kherson. Nowadays, clothes from Olena’s shop aren’t worn only in Kryvyi Rih, as she also receives orders from abroad. The woman dreams that soon she will be able to return to her hometown and once again please customers with Ukrainian embroidered shirts.

For reference: on November 11, 2022, the Defense Forces of Ukraine liberated Kherson from the occupiers. Since then russia has been constantly shelling the city and killing Kherson civilians. 

• culture
• occupation
• reconstruction
• women
• Dnipro