The founder of the Ukrainian Women’s Guard, Olena Biletska, boasted that some of the women in the resistance group were able to fight and kill with ordinary objects, such as writing utensils.
“We have women who can kill with office supplies,” Bilecka said in an interview with war correspondent Tim Mak. “Like a pencil or a pen… It’s not just guns or rifles, but items available at the office supply store,” she explained.
Bilecka founded the Ukrainian Women’s Guard in 2014 to prepare women for war. Since then, the Guard has trained over 60,000 people. women. While most of the Guard’s classes focus on combat, the participants, whom Bilecka calls “Amazons,” also learn how to provide battlefield medical care, humanitarian support, and intelligence. Bilecka told Mak that she hoped to teach the members of the guard that they could do anything.
According to the statistics of the US Embassy, more than 60,000 Ukrainian women are currently serving in the country’s military. According to Social Europe, in October 2022, around eight thousand women served in the Ukrainian army as officers. Women soldiers face difficult challenges in the fight against the Russian invasion. Ukrainian women on the front lines told The Invisible Battalion Project that they fear sexual violence from Russian soldiers. The women admitted that they avoided captivity at all costs, choosing death over capture.
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The above text is a reprint from the US edition of Insider, prepared entirely by the local editorial staff.
Translation: Mateusz Albin
