“Women and War” by Sharon Buttry

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, my heart immediately turned to the many women I met there during my visit in 2019. Of course, everyone in Ukraine knows this war “started” eight years ago in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea. And that this 2022 invasion was an escalation of a conflict that has claimed many thousands of lives. During my visit I saw hundreds of memorials with photos of victims, row upon row, winding though the parks and public places. This new invasion also exposed the wounds never healed over from the Maidan. Some of the women spoke of family members who died in that conflict and how this new invasion refocuses ones’ attention on unresolved trauma. The pain cycles around again and again.

An opportunity came up for me to attend a zoom webinar about the role of women in the war in Ukraine. I attended the webinar, took notes and started painting my impression of the myriad of roles women fulfill in a time of war:

Caregiving for family and neighbors, refugees

Making food for soldiers and neighbors

Making bombs

Confronting and shaming enemy soldiers

Providing shelter

Sewing uniforms and bandages

Harvesting and preserving food

Translation of documents, and documenting atrocities and social needs

Many of these roles involved unpaid and undocumented labor. But the war effort and initiatives for peace cannot be sustained without women taking on these critical roles.

War is completely disruptive and disorienting, especially for women. Men leave the family to join the fighting, and some women do too. Those left behind become more vulnerable to domestic violence and abuse in time of war from significant others and relatives, and at the hands of the military. Terrible stories emerged in this war of women raped in front of their children then killed. It reminded me of Liberia and so many other conflict stages where this has happened repeatedly.

The emotional labor of trauma and healing also falls heavily on women. Estimates suggest that more than 80% of children in Ukraine will be traumatized by this war. Just think about what that means for future generations, so true of all places in the world caught up in the intense violence or war, and even low-intensity prolonged conflicts.

In the webinar one woman church social worker from Dnipro spoke about welcoming refugees transiting through her city. Many pastors did not leave cities that were under siege. Instead, they stayed to ferry refugees to safety, to cities where they could find help. The church social worker described the women refugees who had lost all their friends, not even able to speak because they were in so much shock and grief. The “ministry of presence,” just sitting with people in their unspoken pain became for this woman a profound space of grace to offer her guests.

PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder creates a ‘frozen’ aspect to life. Projects are put on hold, a sense of purpose is brutally disrupted. One cannot even make short term plans. There can be a sense of euphoria, to be part of something big and important and then all of a sudden, falling apart, insomnia, nightmares, horrible images that one cannot erase, things that cannot be ‘un-seen.”

One woman fled with her family to stay with relatives in Moldova. They were used to being there often as guests, but how different it felt to be ‘visiting’ as refugees. Fear would rise up in her heart about whether or not she and her children would ever be able to go back home, and if they could, how would life ever seem ‘normal’ again.

Another woman who works in faith based international aid spoke about her Russian colleagues she had counted as friends, as sisters in Christ, but now she finds them to be unwilling to continue any friendship or even Christian fellowship.

One of the themes of the webinar was “TRUTH.” Global peace warriors will remember the training tool: TRUTH, JUSTICE, MERCY and PEACE. The women spoke about propaganda tricks that threaten the truth. These fake truths separate people and even take on a theological flavor separating people of faith around ideology and politics. War threatens one’s sense of identity, calls values into question, requires a mental paradigm shift as all that is familiar is pulled out from under you. One woman spoke about re-thinking God’s election of His chosen ones, God’s mercy and transcendence. Women on active duty described feeling split in half, “part Deborah, part Jael” (see Judges 4:21). War changes women and threatens to de-humanize them. The challenge is to “balance the gut and the heart”, to maintain some type of psycho-social balance. The women said that men’s’ voice is often about ‘analysis and victory.’ Women’s voice is about ‘pain and labor,’ the dreadful costs of the war, the human expense and mess that has to be cleaned up over a long period of time.

I made note of three quotes: “The work of grace is the work of telling the truth.” The women spoke about prayer. We want to hold on to the hope expressed in prayers that things will change, instead of succumbing to a fear that things will NEVER change. “For us to get the country on our feet we must get on our knees.” And “can we find a prayer for our enemy?”

Two books were mentioned: WHERE IS GOD WHEN IT HURTS? by Philip Yancey and THE GIFT OF PAIN by Paul Brand. Women were trying to make sense of total disruption and chaos. Feelings of abandonment and being forgotten by God has led to an increase in despair and suicide. The women spoke of the necessity of reminding each other to seek God, to look for His face, “because He is searching for you.”

I wrote a poem that you can see in my painting. It was translated into the Ukrainian language by Veronika Voloshyna, our colleague and an amazing peacebuilder from the eastern part of Ukraine. In English the poem is:

“There are not enough hours in the day.

There are too many hours in the day.

My heart is broken.”

I also found this article that further documents and confirms the things I learned in the webinar with some great photos: