Authors

Tamara Martsenyuk¹;  ¹ University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine

Discussion

The Revolution of Dignity inspired women in Ukraine to fight for their rights especially in the military sphere (Invisible Battalion 5.0, 2023). Grass-root activism has a long tradition in Ukraine, and women actively participated in building up “bottom-up” changes in the country. Women emerged as more visible actors in the public space and became eager to raise issues of inequality and claim gender justice. At the same time, there are still some challenges in gender equality implementation that need more attention and political will to be implemented. The value of human dignity (Nikolayenko, 2020) articulated in the Euromaidan protests is becoming the benchmark for women fighting for their rights. Agency, in contrast to victimhood, became the key concept to explain the resistance of Ukrainian women, especially after the full-scale invasion (Phillips & Martsenyuk, 2023). Values of dignity and equality are connected with the European vector of so-called “civilizational choice” (between Europe and “Russkiy mir”) that Ukraine made from the beginning of the Euromaidan protests (Martsenyuk, 2022).