February 24 marked the third anniversary of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Various options for peace are being debated internationally, often without focusing on Ukrainian perspectives and interests. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, PRIF researcher Clara Perras conducted a written Interview with Olena Zinenko, a Ukrainian feminist peace activist and researcher from Kharkiv who currently lives and works in Bochum. She is lecturer at Karazin Kharkiv National University (online), guest researcher in IFHV Ruhr University Bochum and project coordinator at KRF “Public Alternative”.
How do you experience the current situation in Ukraine for civil society and especially feminist peace activists?
My hometown is Kharkiv, which is close to the Ukrainian-Russian border. Still, every day, the Russian aggression results in the killing of civilians, destructions of homes, schools and hospitals.
Although I have been away from home for three years now, I have found opportunities to visit Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Lviv. I am doing what I can do best – I inform others about events in Ukraine abroad, teach students, analyze the media, facilitate trainings, and contribute to the development of peacebuilding policies in education and the public sector. While staying in touch with friends and organizing meetings for women activists both in Ukraine and abroad, I continuously monitor social media and collaborate with academic and NGO colleagues. With the Cat-Ua analysis team we have produced a very important analysis for the NGO on how Ukrainians talk about psychological stages in social media.
We are currently training and advising 20 Ukrainian NGOs, with a core group for peacebuilding, to develop communication strategies and civil society activities to build bridges between women in Ukraine and abroad. In the eastern and southern regions, these NGOs focus on providing psychological support, caring for evacuees and supporting women who have suffered violence, including those who have been evacuated or resettled from the occupied territories. Women are predominantly involved in these civil society activities. There are activists who used to work in NGOs, but also many women who became volunteers and activists as a result of the invasion and resettlement abroad. In my book, “Voices along the road”, I portrayed 24 stories of Ukrainian women. On the one hand, such work allows them to organise their time freely, while on the other, women choose to volunteer in order to help their relatives, because they often have obligations (society’s expectations) to look after children or elderly relatives. Women are mainly active in the fields of social work, education and medicine. In the central and western regions, there are more integration and education projects, and there is a lot of emphasis on helping women with children. Examples of such projects are R2P’s Mission, which provides consulting and humanitarian support for internally displaced persons, “Leage of Straights”, which supports people with disabilities, or the local Grun Community Development Hub, which provide activities to increase the enjoyment of human rights by women and girls.
Over time, however, I have realised that the constant pressure of this work has led to widespread burnout and physical exhaustion among activists.
How do you personally experience the current debates about peace negotiations coming from the Trump administration?
I believe that the current debates on peace negotiations, particularly those promoted by the Trump administration, have lost the human dimension that is essential in democratic discourse. What is happening now is something that shouldn’t be happening – a narrative is being promoted that evil can be negotiated with. If you listen closely to Trump’s speeches, despite their eclectic character – with one thesis often contradicting another – you can nonetheless identify something constant in his narrative repertoire. In his communication, Trump consistently promotes both direct and related narratives of Russian propaganda. In particular, that ‘Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s aggression’, that ‘Ukraine is not ready for peace because it is defending itself’, and that ‘Europe is weak because of its tolerance for diversity’. Even if we do not appeal to the analysis of propaganda, these are the theses that look like gaslighting or abuses and are in my personal view unacceptable in relation to a country suffering from war. These are hazardous signals both internationally and to US citizens and people living there. But I strongly reject policies that normalize discrimination, violence, and devaluation of knowledge and would like to cite Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, who advocated for a “new humanist movement that would work with meanings, educate people, build grass-root support and engage people in the protection of rights and freedoms. This movement should unite intellectuals and activists from different countries, because the ideas of freedom and human rights are universal and have no state borders.”
Back in Ukraine, you were actively working with civil society organizations on inclusion, human rights, gender equality and anti-discrimination. What were the focal points of your work?
Before 2022, I did a lot of activities such as in-person trainings and huge public events in cultural space and urban areas. I coordinated a series of projects to promote human rights, gender equality, and inclusion in the public sector. For example, with the project “InclusionFest“, I curated events aiming to activate communication between the general public and people with disabilities, and with “Dytiacha PloschARTka” and also between parents, children, and educators.
Now, I focus more on analytical work, academic writing, and networking. What I see is that Ukrainian women do not give up but switch to the activities that they can do in their current context. If they were entrepreneurs and couldn’t move their business, they became volunteers and built communities, both in Ukraine and abroad. This is challenging. Every time you move you should start with a blank list of paper. The displacement triggered by the 2022 conflict underscored that women’s strength lies in networking. In Ukraine, many civil society organizations support women, people with disabilities, and children, while also promoting psychosocial support, cultural programs, and art initiatives. In times of crisis, these projects have proven their potential by connecting people and offering mutual help.
Often, women are the driving force behind such projects. The challenge is that women’s participation in political decision-making is still too low. Therefore, our work has focused on empowering women to have a strong voice – especially in the media. The topics of non-discrimination, inclusion, and human rights protection must be heard, and women must influence the strengthening of democratic processes. For example, the Ukrainian programme ‘Networking for Peacebuilding’, which we are currently implementing in partnership with the global network PeaceWomen Across the Globe, we aim to empower women by researching needs on the ground, in local contexts, and providing opportunities to share experiences and manifest their knowledge. We have a strong communications component because it is precisely because of a lack of awareness that women have limited access to political participation. One of our goals in networking is to create an understanding of the goals of needs-based advocacy and to showcase the expertise of women activists.
How have the last three years of war changed the work of feminist civil society in Ukraine?
The conflict has transformed the landscape of feminist civil society in Ukraine. A significant milestone was the ratification of the Istanbul Convention. This highlights the important role of women’s organisations and their expertise in shaping public opinion. The brutal exposure of war crimes, such as those in Bucha, made the issues of of violence extremely relevant. Experts in anti-violence and gender equality had a strong social media presence and enough trust among like-minded people to initiate a discussion of this topic within the framework of respect for human dignity, demanding ethical coverage of the event without silencing but with respect for the human dignity of victims of violence.
Today, the role of women in peacebuilding processes during the war is recognisable and goes beyond stereotypical patriarchal perceptions. Women’s professionalism and expertise allow us to keep the focus on the values of respect for human dignity, life, and education for the future. A special example is the presence of women at the battlefront, not only in so-called ‘female’ peaceful professions (bureaucracy, medicine), but also in military ones. Another example is women abroad who have left their children behind, leaving their husbands in Ukraine. In such circumstances, women take on the role of the head of the family, and this restructures family relationships fundamentally. Women take care of family and friends to a greater extent in Ukraine. They are the most vulnerable and the most overburdened. While women know the needs of the civilian population, i.e. the needs of peacebuilding on the ground, they do not always have access to the negotiation process. Women do not shape the political agenda, and this narrows the range of issues raised during peace and war negotiations. We need to empower women, create spaces for debate to show their initiative. Networking and exchange of experience is one of the most powerful tools. Women also need access to the media, where they should act not only as objects for storytelling, but as experts with relevant knowledge.
What concrete demands for peace are being made by Ukrainian feminist civil society?
When I think of peace, I argue that the concept needs to be redefined. In the course of events, it has become clear that a definition of peace as the absence of war is insufficient. A limited form of peace can exist during wartime, but it’s a distorted version incompatible with human rights, where the collective pursuit of ideals and values is replaced by a cruel struggle for survival. Aggressors in the discursive fields of power (politics, media, business) work to define and manipulate the meaning of peace to control those most in need of it. Media discourse reflects reality, which is why human needs and human security should drive discussions on social media during war. Yet it should be borne in mind that human needs are not limited to water and food, and that the strategic needs of humanity are to support education and cultural development as the foundation for long-term sustainable and human-centered peacebuilding. Ultimately, any concept of peace must be capable of accounting for both its implementation as well as its contestation. These ideas on the discourse and politics of peace continue lines of thought pursued by my colleagues in the global network, PeaceWomen Across the Globe, and I am also working on peace discourse in my academic project at the IFHV in Bochum.
Additionally, the ‘four pillars’ defined in the Resolution 1325 ‘Women. Peace. Security’ – women’s participation, conflict prevention, protection and assistance and rehabilitation – can form the basis for this understanding of peace. However, this must not just involve making empty promises and using the WPS agenda as verbal cover by politicians. The four principles must be implemented in practice and must actually respond to the diverse needs of communities on the ground. Women are experts on these needs; they know the context, but do they have the opportunity to speak up and share this knowledge? Not always.
On 4 March, the EU Gender Equality Index was presented in Ukraine for the first time. The index focuses on seven domains: work, money, knowledge, time, power, health, and violence. Ukraine scored well in the Time domain, where it exceeds the EU average due to the active involvement of women and men in charity and volunteering. At the same time, there is still an imbalance in the Power domain – women are underrepresented in leadership positions. The question remains how these policies will be implemented on the ground. This directly depends on women’s empowerment to participate in political decision-making and have their voices heard on peacebuilding needs, also in times of war. This is not only a matter of protection in the military sense, but to ensure sustainable peace as a process that promotes an environment in which peace and human security are valued over the right to power and status.
Clara Perras
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Olena Zinenko
