‘I will go back to help’

PRZEMYSL (AP):

While over three million people have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, a small but growing number are heading in the other direction. At first they were foreign volunteers, Ukrainian expatriate men returning to fight and people delivering aid. Now, increasingly, women are also going back.

Motivated by a desire to help loved ones in trouble, or to contribute to the defence and survival of their country and compatriots in ways large and small, these women are braving the bombs that have increasingly pounded Ukraine since Russian forces invaded on February 24.

Many are not refugees but Ukrainian women who had been living and working abroad. Others had already chosen to stay put in their country but were forced to cross the border to shop for needed goods as supplies dried up under the onslaught at home.

“I will go back and help. I am a health worker, so the hospitals need help,” said Iryna Orel, 50, lugging her luggage as she boarded a train from Przemysl, Poland, to Lviv in western Ukraine. “And I will stay until the end.”

With Ukraine’s government ordering men to stay and fight, the vast majority of people fleeing Ukraine have been women, children and the elderly. For those who can’t or won’t leave, the perils they face are many, and images such as those of a mortally wounded pregnant woman rushed on a stretcher from a maternity hospital in Mariupol testify to the dangers.

Still, some women have chosen to head back toward the gunfire and bloodshed to contribute in whatever way they can.

Reached by phone after arriving in the port city of Odesa, which has so far remained under Ukrainian government control, Orel said she was frightened at first by the air raid sirens and sounds of explosives, but “sitting and shaking with fear does not help”.

She envisions her role as providing medical care, but other women might choose to help defend the country militarily, she said.

“Women can fight,” she said. “Many women are patriotic to defend Ukraine – why not?”

Women rushing into war zones or taking part in war efforts is nothing new. Female soldiers were a visible part of the Ukrainian military before the war, including in combat roles. Some women, like many men, are taking up arms for the first time. Plus, gender equality in the workplace as well as the military has traditionally been more common in post-Soviet states like Ukraine than many other parts of the world.

Since the invasion, Polish border guards have tallied over 195,000 crossings of people from Poland to Ukraine, more than four in five Ukrainian nationals, spokeswoman Anna Michalska said Tuesday.

That includes people who come and return – to buy food and other supplies in Poland and go back, or who bring relatives across and return. So some people are counted a number of times.