Female commander near Bakhmut fights Russia, gender stereotypes on the battlefield

 Yuliia Mykytenko, the commander of a Ukrainian air reconnaissance platoon deployed near Bakhmut, has gotten used to seeing surprised faces when doing her job.

Though the 27-year-old is a seasoned service member, Mykytenko said she frequently encounters sexist comments on the battlefield, such as “You are a girl, how can you go (to the front line)? Aren’t you scared of the shelling?”

The senior lieutenant says she has learned to ignore these comments, instead focusing on doing her job – leading a platoon that uses drones to observe Russian positions.

While Mykytenko says gender discrimination in the Ukrainian military has abated somewhat over the years, a traditional male-centric mentality persists in the army, with some soldiers judging fighting ability based on gender.

Since Russia first invaded in 2014, Ukrainian women have fought to serve alongside men in the hottest spots of the conflict and have the same rights. A 2018 law finally made female soldiers legally equivalent to males, allowing them to officially serve in front-line combat positions.

Mykytenko is among the roughly 60,000 women serving in the Ukrainian military. While that number is growing, it is still a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of male soldiers. An estimated 5,000 women are serving in active combat roles.

Only 8.9% of officers are women, and none hold senior military roles, according to a March report by the Ukrainian Veterans Foundation, a state institution run by the Ministry of Veterans Affairs.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has bolstered female presence in the army, with tens of thousands of Ukrainian women stepping up to defend their country.

Even though Mykytenko first joined the military in 2016, the decision to take up arms once again amid Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 has become deeply personal: she lost her husband and father, both soldiers, over the course of Russia’s nine-year-long war.