Ukraine’s “Invisible Battalion”: Perceptions and Treatment of Gender in the Donbas War

This conceptual essay addresses a gap in the literature regarding first-person perspectives of women veterans. It applies a feminist lens to a thematic analysis of first-person narratives by women who participated in the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) during the Donbas war in eastern Ukraine (2014–2022) by drawing on qualitative data contained in 25 published textual accounts (in Girls Cutting Their Locks (Podobna, 2018)) and six accounts documented on film (in Invisible Battalion (Tsilyk et al., 2017)). In these testimonies, women soldiers share their perceptions of gender discrimination along with their experiences at war, thus providing a powerful feminist historiographical alternative to dominant, and almost exclusively male, war narratives. To study the impact of gender in Ukraine’s official military and volunteer battalions, three themes are analyzed: gender-based stereotypes and discrimination; women’s responses to gender-based differences; and the emotional and psychosocial impacts of war on women. By analyzing the unique socio-historical experiences of Ukrainian women in wartime, this project contributes to the fields of military and veterans studies a better understanding of the lived experiences of women serving in the military across the world, and in turn, by advocating for practical social, legal, and attitudinal changes based on these experiences and perceptions.