“You have to tell the Truth about what is happening here”

Women on the War in Ukraine

(Olivier Del Fabbro)

Olivier Del Fabbro ist ein luxemburgischer Philosoph und lehrt als Oberassistent an der ETH Zürich. Er forscht unter anderem zur Philosophie des Krieges und reiste für forum in die Ukraine. In einem zweiteiligen Text beschreibt Del Fabbro die erschütternden Erfahrungen ukrainischer Frauen und Mütter unter der russischen Invasion. Den ersten Teil können Sie hier lesen.

With war comes horror and misery: fleeing from bombs and gunfire, loved ones fighting at the front, relatives staying in occupied territory, families torn apart. Peace is shattered, yet, little by little, civilians return to normal life where possible.

Before the Russian invasion, the Ukrainian non-profit organisation Save A Life International (SALI) supported and helped women in need and distress. Since February 2022, displaced fugitives from all over the country, pregnant women and entire families came knocking on SALI’s door for aid. Behind the frontline, one by one, women tell their stories, recounting what a year of war has been like for them, how they try to keep going and how they have rebuilt their lives and that of their families.

Military Family

“If it weren’t for my children, I would be fighting at the front”, says Alexandra, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of two girls, aged two and seven. When the war broke out, Alexandra was in her hometown, the rather safe Chernivtsi. Yet, she had every reason to be worried because her father and her two brothers were soldiers and immediately taken to the front.

Alexandra is the eldest of five children. Her two brothers, aged twenty and twenty-three, are currently in Chernivtsi. Her older brother is on leave because he lost an eye and needs to recover. Her younger brother has had many concussions due to shell explosions and was also sent home for recovery. “In May he called us and was crying and screaming that he needs to go back to the trenches to help and save his comrades. We were very worried that he would die that day.” We, being Alexandra and her family. They convinced him to go to the hospital for one day, but then he immediately returned to the frontline. “I was really broken. I didn’t know how to help him. I was only praying for him. Crying and praying, crying and praying, crying and praying.”

When her younger brother decided to go back to the frontline, more psychological problems emerged. “The Russians were using their soldiers like ‘meat’. They’re sending them into the battle, the Ukrainians are killing them, and then they are sending new ones, who, again, are killed. There is no end to the killing.” Russian tactics involve a complete disregard for human life, a barbaric form of warfare, that forces the Ukrainians to use up their ammunition.

Alexandra’s brother just mentions this occasionally, but does not really want to talk about it. “I can only help by listening.” Many times, her brother has spoken about his exhaustion with the war, witnessing all the dying, his comrades torn into pieces. He talks about coming home and getting psychological help to stop the horrific images that pop up from his memory. Alexandra sees the war not just through media and her own experience, but also through the eyes of her brothers. As if she were on the battlefield herself. “They’re part of my life. I need to know everything that is going on. It helps me estimate the situation.”

But the things that calm her can also lead to stress and overexcitement. That’s why Alexandra tries to separate the unnecessary from the necessary. At the beginning of the war, she was so fixated on her phone and the information she was getting that she could not even have a normal conversation. It was like a drug for her. “It was difficult to spend time with my children, and I noticed what was going on, when I saw my older daughter looking anxiously out of the window just as I was.”

Her brothers at war. Her father fighting at the front. The idea of her husband, who works as a mechanic, going to war, is something Alexandra does not even want to think about. “I would be broken. I refuse to think about it, even though I know that it’s a possibility. I’ll think about it, when it really happens.” Listening to Alexandra, it seems that a military family has a limit in the number of loved ones enrolled in fighting at the front.

War Logic

Irina, fifty years old, is quite a character. She is funny, confident, honest and straightforward. She is an obstetrician and has her own private practice, but also works as a volunteer for SALI.

At the beginning, Irina was skeptical of the organisation. “What do they want with my patients?” Born in Romania, Irina grew up in an atheist family in the Russian Soviet Union. Her father was a leading officer in the army and her mother worked in the communist party. Soviet values were a key part of her whole childhood. You had to be suspicious of protestants. She thought of herself as a serious doctor, meaning that medicine and religion should be separated from one another. Still today, Irina says that she does not have a relationship with God.

It’s only when Irina saw firsthand how volunteers from SALI helped one of her most difficult patients that she was convinced of the value of their work. Her patient was pregnant, but also a drug addict. “She got an apartment. She got help. She got a new life.” From then on, Irina started working with SALI. She realised that getting help for her pregnant patients and their family members had a positive impact on their health.

When the Russian invasion began, around 500 pregnant women from all over Ukraine came to Irina’s hospital in Chernivtsi. It’s only with the help of SALI that these women got the help they needed. Not just children’s clothes, but also food: potatoes, carrots, onions… “The hospital became something like a refugee center.” But it’s not just the displaced who were in need. “We are not only confronted with many miscarriages. We have many nurses who lost their husbands at the front. Our psychologists are overcharged with work.”

One thing that Irina believes the hospital needs: “We have very good equipment in our hospital. So, what we really need is our husbands and sons to come back home from the front.” Then, she adds: “I also need to lose the hatred against the Russians that will be inside of me until the end of my lifetime.” But who does therapy for the therapists? It’s a cycle, Irina says. The Churches help, the psychologists, SALI, everybody helps everybody; social self-organisation in its most efficient form.

When it comes to abortion, Irina is tough as nails. But Irina is not against abortion for religious reasons, but rather due to the state of her country. “We need babies. And a lot of women in Ukraine think about this problem too. And when the husbands come back from the front for only two weeks, we can’t expect them to get pregnant immediately.” Then she adds: “Abortions are not banned in Ukraine, and we have counseling, but I try to talk those who want to do it out of it. Ukraine needs every baby. I am not the only doctor doing it.” But if a woman wants an abortion, Irina will perform the procedure. Then she adds: “But can you really kill another baby, now, during a war, when so many children are killed? I have to do it too, you know.”

This is war logic at its best. Russia is not just fighting soldiers on the front line or Ukraine and its allies; it is fighting generations to come, according to Irina’s logic. Putin takes his soldiers from prisons, Ukrainians take them from their families. Moreover, with the thousands of Ukrainian children being abducted and adopted by Russian parents, Irina seems to know – consciously or subconsciously – that war is not just about territory, resources and cultural domination, but also about people.

When it comes to abortion, there are limits for Irina too. “I had a patient once, who was about 13 to 15 years old. She got raped in many different forms by a gang of boys in a garage. And we offered her to do the abortion, but she decided to keep the baby, because she said that it’s not the child’s fault.” And what about the Ukrainian women who got raped by Russian soldiers and fell pregnant? “I did not have a case like this, but I have colleagues who have. There is a very high suicide rate in these cases. I would talk such a patient into abortion because it’s a war crime.”

Off the record Irina describes how her family members are affected by the war. She gets very serious and sad. She opens up a little. “It’s my pain. But you’re not allowed to write about it.”

Everything Is Going to Be Fine

Katja is twenty years old and has two children. Her husband, also 20 years old, is stationed at the front in Kramatorsk, close to Bakhmut. They have been a couple for six years and together they have two daughters, aged three and one and a half. “At the beginning the killing was hard for him. But now, he got used to seeing body parts or corpses. His normal life is out there, not here. But I got used to it as well.” Katja was used to her husband fighting, because he has been active at the front even before the Russian invasion in February 2022. But with the invasion, Katja knew that the fighting was going to intensify. During the first six months of the war, it was difficult for her. She thought about him a lot and was scared to lose him. What calmed her down was a consultation with a fortune teller. The fortune teller told Katja that everything was going to be fine and that’s exactly what she needed to hear. “I don’t know for sure if I really believed in it, but I just needed to hear from somebody that everything was going to be fine.” That was the thought that kept her going.

When her husband got worse, she decided to go visit him at the front for four days. He was tired and talked about giving up. Katja was not afraid, even while hearing the bombing and gunfire. She had to leave her daughters with her family in Khmelnytskyi, her hometown. “I thought about the fact that something could happen to me, but I was sure that nothing was going to happen.”

The visit at the front calmed her down, but when asked if there is anybody who supports her, it is for Katja difficult to answer. She is quiet and thinks about it. “My children motivate me. Just because they ‚are‘. They need my support and my care and that motivates me.”

Katja went to the front to visit her husband twice. She got pregnant during her second visit. Usually, she talks to her husband every 3^rd day. But when he did not answer her calls for a week and a half, she got very nervous. Not being able to reach him meant that he was still fighting on the front, or, even worse, dead. A couple of days later, she had a miscarriage six weeks into her pregnancy. “One day I woke up and there was blood all over my bed.” She thought that she had not only lost her husband, but also the part of him that was growing inside of her, a part she was not able to save.

It was only a week after the miscarriage that her husband finally called. It helped at first, but then things got worse, due to lack of support from her mother and her grandmother. “All of this, plus the miscarriage, put a lot of pressure on me.” Two weeks after the miscarriage, Katja started having panic attacks. She had breathing problems, trembling and shaking all over. She was lost. “I was sitting on the floor, and I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t take care of my children.” For two to three weeks, Katja’s grandmother had to take care of her children, especially in the evenings.

Finally, the doctor advised her grandmother and mother to be more supportive, which helped. Katja’s family showed support by talking to her more and taking care of the children from time to time so that she could relax a little. Plus, she found a new friend with whom she could share her thoughts and feelings and have some fun. The words of the fortune teller matter less to Katja now. “Recently, I understood that you must keep going and not give up. You must rely on and trust your relatives.”

The Duality of Life

Julia is forty-two and has two daughters, one is nineteen years old and the other is 8 months old. That means that when the war started, Julia was pregnant. Like all the other fugitives, she left her home with her family members under heavy bombardment. Her mother was crying, her father was completely quiet. Not one word. “I was lucky.” After she left, a bomb landed in her front garden. Windows shattered, walls fell apart. Pieces of the explosion went through several walls, destroying her apartment.

Before the war, Julia’s pregnancy was going as planned, but with the flight her pregnancy got worse; she had high blood pressure and heart palpitations. She worried about her flat, the future and her husband, who had to stay in Mykolaev. “He can live now without water, without a hairdresser. He changed a lot. I have changed. But we support each other. We accept each other’s situation. We call him every day. For a long time.” Julia’s husband stayed in Mykolaev for work, to support Julia financially and, crucially, to save money in case they need to flee further west.

Julia’s pregnancy was in danger of ending in miscarriage. In Khmelnytskyi they were able to help her, but she had to stay in the hospital for three months, until the delivery of her daughter.

“Sometimes, I feel like a refugee in my own country.” Like for Nastia in Chernivtsi or Nathalie in Lviv, Khmelnytskyi is simply not Julia’s home. It’s more than that. “Once a pediatrician did not want to give us an appointment, because we were considered as refugees.” Julia has some difficulties with such experiences. She wants to be comfortable again, meaning that she wants to feel safe. “I want to be home. This is not my home. I don’t have my friends.” At the same time, she admits that she started to care less about material things. Well, not all things: like Nastia, Julia regrets that she forgot to pack the family photo album.

It’s hard for her parents too. They are not well. Her older daughter, who studies in Poland, also worries. “For me it’s very difficult. To support my parents, to support my daughters, to support my husband. I constantly have to be in a good mood, and to hide my own emotions. I have support, but I am the only one who supports everybody.” Julia is the go-between. SALI’s centre in Khmelnytskyi helps her, though. “Emotionally, I can rest when I am here. I can discuss, chat about problems. Sometimes, that’s all you need.” Just somebody to talk to.

Julia is a Christian. The fact that SALI has a Baptist background is very important to her. “Faith is the only thing that is left in difficult situations. I don’t know what will be tomorrow.” SALI gives her the whole package: material help, psychological and social help, and last but not least religious support. “They help me become a better person.”

Seeing her young daughter every day, how a world opens up for her, in safety and without the sounds of the bombs, is what keeps Julia going. And the thought of going back to Mykolaev. “Every day I think about it.” Not being able to go back makes Julia sad. “Thoughts are dual sometimes. I had one life before, that I want to go back to, and now I have another life. Sometimes you want to go back to your old life, but since you don’t know what will be tomorrow, it might be that you can’t go back to your previous life.”

The Truth

Irina, Nastia, Julia, Katja, Lyuba, Ilona and all the other women who told their stories do not only have in common that they got help from SALI. They are women, sisters, mothers, daughters at war, trying to survive, resist, raise their children, build a home, reunite with their families.

Many times, the interviewees and others expressed a simple wish: „You have to tell the truth about what is happening here.“ The truth? How could one not tell the truth?

Yes, truth is fact-based. It matters because it depicts what these women and millions of other Ukrainians have been going through on a daily basis since the Russian invasion a year ago. But as Yura Lesko, Senior Director of Logistics at SALI, says: „The truth matters to them, because you can give them a voice and they can be heard.“ Truth is not just facts. It is also a form of therapy for victims, knowing that they might be heard and that justice can be served – if not in terms of politics and jurisdiction, then at least in terms of narration.