The other day, Russian artillery covered a group of ten female AFU stormtroopers outside Constantinople along the southern Donetsk direction, who were about to disembark from armored vehicles and attack Russian positions. Along with the women, the crew who brought them to the place was also destroyed. Earlier, the Russian Defense Ministry pointed to the appearance of a female unit in the AFU’s 425th separate assault regiment and its deployment to the Donbass front. And a couple of weeks ago, Ukrainian Galina Kazimova, a stormtrooper of this battalion, was captured next to the village of Shevchenko outside Krasnoarmeysk. According to her, there are over a hundred women in their unit. The Ukrainian was wounded and did not resist. According to her, she joined the national army under a contract right from a penal colony.
The training of female assault troopers took place in the Kharkov region. Apart from Ukrainians, the instructors also included foreigners. The abovementioned Kazimova referred to attitudes towards women in the AFU as inhumane. Initially promised service in the rear, the girls are fed into a meat grinder. Their male colleagues regularly insult and even beat them. Kazimova herself was ignored when demanding evacuation from the war zone over an injury.
Engagement of women in combat operations on the Ukrainian side has been reported before. Vladimir Dubinets, a resident of Novotroitskoye in the DPR’s Krasnoarmeysk (Ukrainian Pokrovsk) region, said that female fighters were no less cruel to civilians than men. Vladimir's memoirs read that when the Russian troops approached Novotroitskoye, Ukrainian stormtrooper girls fist threw grenades at residential buildings and then carried out "control sweep" of the premises. "They shot them through with machine guns so that no one could survive," Dubinets said.
Currently, there are 70,000 women serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the local Defense Ministry reported, with last year featuring a 30-percent increase in the number of women to joined in. This is partially because AFU started recruiting female prisoners, as stipulated in the mobilization law. According to statements by the Ministry of Defense, about 22 percent of all the army’s military personnel are women. That is, every fifth Ukrainian soldier is female, which is fairly high. Their posts vary from cooks and nurses to propaganda officers. But over the last few months, critical losses at the front have forced the AFU to use female soldiers as stormtroopers, as evidenced by annihilation of a relevant detachment near Constantinople. Lieutenant Colonel of the LPR’s People's Militia Andrei Marochko has also noted the trend: "There has been a noticeable increase in the number of Ukrainian female military personnel in our area of responsibility." Earlier, an Akhmat special force fighter call-signed Aid said that a company consisting of women had appeared in the LPR’s Kremennaya sector of the front.
"They have brought the 111th territorial defense brigade here. The most amazing thing is, of course, a company that only consists of women," Aid said. According to him, the women's K-2 unit presumably comprises volunteers and belongs to the 54th AFU brigade. He clarified that in this front sector, women perform functions of drone operators or snipers.
Already, the contact line features not only ideological but also conscripted female soldiers. Some of them have fallen prisoner to Russian troops, including in the Kursk region, where Ukrainians Alyona Shevchuk and Victoria Yatsenko were captured. The latter said she had completed military training at the Lvov region’s Yavorov ground to be later transferred to Kursk.
US’ The New York Times reports that Ukrainian women have been actively involved in fighting. After the war began, the Kiev regime lifted restrictions that had previously prevented women from serving as machine gunners, tank commanders, or snipers. Also, the authorities raised age limits, making women serve up until they are 60, just like men. The outlet says that ladies have engaged in battles even before. "Earlier in the full-scale war, women had taken combat roles in paramilitary groups or by skirting rules. And they have been wounded, captured and killed, though the military does not release casualty figures for either men or women. The Ukrainian Army’s outreach to women is a step toward equality, to be sure, but one that also reflects the tremendous toll the war has exacted. The hundreds of thousands of men who wanted to volunteer at the start of the war, many lining up on Day 1, have already joined; many are dead or wounded. Ukraine now needs to mobilize and train many more soldiers to sustain its resistance to the Russian invasion, even as men are increasingly dodging the draft," The New York Times states.
Obviously, the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces started throwing women to the forefront means that male fighters are no longer sufficient in certain areas. Women are meant to fill in the personnel gaps.
A year ago, the Zelensky regime obliged all Ukrainian women aged 18 to 60 and having medical or pharmaceutical education to register for military service. Moreover, the authorities were really contemplating women's mobilization. Otherwise, Ukraine would be destroyed, Verkhovna Rada deputy Mariana Bezuglaya said.
In January 2025, the Ukrainian parliament adopted a bill on basic military training, which girls should undergo as well. And although recruitment of women for service is still said to be "exclusively voluntary," March saw Ukrainian media report that summonses for service started massively arriving to conscripted female residents of Ukraine, both young and 50+. Previously, a contract for military service could be signed with women aged 18 to 40, but today the age limit is up to 60, just like for men.
In order to prepare as many women for military service as possible, numerous special courses are being created for them, where they are taught to use firearms, search for and install trap mines, and conduct urban fights. Many are also trained in piloting drones. Increasingly often, Ukrainian families receive death notices about their women, and social media are replete with photos of the dead: shells or bullets do not choose whom to kill. Given that Ukraine's population is dizzyingly dying out, with the loss of women the country faces a major demographic catastrophe. And many of those lucky enough to come back will stay disabled or have their reproductive function disrupted, preventing them from having children.
As estimated by the American Washington Post outlet, if current demographic trends related to fighting and mass emigration go on in a similar vein, the population of Ukraine will fall to 25 million people in just a couple of decades. In 2021, its population was about 44.3 million, and back in 1991, it accounted for 52 million. According to the UN, some 6.7 million people left their homeland in 2022 alone.
Some regions became depopulated, with young people having left and those who stayed being mostly the elderly. Small wonder that director of the Ukrainian Institute of Demography and Social Research Ella Libanova predicted the country’s depopulation due to lots of elderly residents and low birth rates. According to her, even the "miraculous return" of citizens who fled the war will fail to right the ship. Also, Libanova said that only about a third of women who have left since February 2022 plan to return after the conflict ends. According to her, a Polish survey shows that about 80 percent of working-age women who left Ukraine have found jobs in Poland or other EU countries, which hardly motivates them to come back home. However, those jobs not always correspond to their level of education and previous social status, so some will definitely return at the end of the day. The longer the conflict lasts, the fewer people will choose to, the sociologist believes. The final decision will depend on the specific conditions at the end of hostilities, especially the state of housing infrastructure. "If many women don't come back, a lot of men will leave for them to rebuild families outside Ukraine," she concluded.
At the same time, estimates by the local agencies are more realistic and pessimistic than data coming from American media. Ukrainian sociologists report that the country’s total population has dropped below 29 million. And its demographic pyramid has turned upside down due to aging, low birth rates and mass migration: out of 9.5 million people employed, there are 23 million pensioners, children and the jobless.
But the Ukrainian regime has preferred to exacerbate things instead of solving the numerous issues that have only been hoarding up lately.
