Daily Archives: March 21, 2022

A bloodied man empties his wallet to his creditor while being mercilessly attacked by an unprovoked assailant. This is the plight of Ukraine, which recently made a scheduled interest payment to private lenders as tanks rolled over its land and missiles struck its cities. Even before Vladimir Putin started bombing apartment blocks and maternity hospitals, Ukraine was Europes poorest country as measured by GDP per capita significantly poorer than Albania. Yet this war-ravaged country is saddled with unsustainable debt and as the piles of rubble grow, so do the repayments. Thats debt for Ukraine, but profits for western hedge funds. War, for some, is the ultimate money-spinner.

Since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 triggering a conflict in the east that had claimed thousands of lives before the current invasion Ukraine has been forced to borrow $61bn (46bn) from external lenders, according to calculations by the Jubilee Debt Campaign; a small sliver has been paid off, but what remains represents about a third of the countrys total economy. Ukraine was due to cough up $7.3bn this year alone more than its annual education budget. For a rich country blessed with peace, that would be manageable, but Ukrainians are poorer today than when the Soviet Union collapsed three decades ago. At least $100bn worth of damage has already been inflicted to infrastructure from roads to bridges, hospitals to schools and, as you read this, that figure only mounts. Yet almost all of the financial assistance being given to Ukraine is in the form of loans. Precious funds will be diverted from rebuilding a shattered country, instead filling the coffers of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and private bondholders.

Putins barbaric siege of Mariupol underlines just how urgent debt cancellation is. While the Russian army seeks to starve and bomb it into submission, the city increasingly suffers the fate of Grozny during the second Chechen war: razed to the ground, piece by piece. It is macabre but necessary to state that Mariupols present state may well be the future of other Ukrainian cities. Each day, billions are added to Ukraines reconstruction bill: it would be pure cruelty to expect this to be repaid as debt.

Thats why Ukrainian civil society organisations have launched a petition demanding Ukraines debt is cancelled. They note, too, that much of the supposed assistance given to the country has been accompanied by strict conditions: the IMF calls it economic restructuring, but its more honestly described as the imposition of free-market dogma, resulting, for instance, in a 650% surge in household gas prices since 2014. Previous governments had two options: either to fairly tax the fat cats and bring them out of the shadows, or to borrow from the IMF and others, Ukrainian economist Oleksandr Kravchuk told me. They chose the latter.

The Jubilee Debt Campaign has taken up this demand and begun to lobby MPs in Britain. Like millions of us, executive director Heidi Chow had that gnawing, helpless sense of weve got to do something. For some, that manifested itself in the demand for a no-fly zone. But in practice, she tells me, thats a shoot Russian military aircraft out of the sky zone, which could easily escalate into nuclear war. In contrast, this is a tangible and hugely impactful proposal with no risk of military escalation.

So why hasnt this commonsense demand been taken up by the powerful? In part, perhaps, its because Ukraines own government hasnt officially called for it, although some high-ranking officials have. They were quite keen before the war to pay debts and push forward their standing in Europe and the world, suggests Chow. Applying for any form of debt relief is a complicated and drawn-out process. Any fears that their ability to borrow and their global reputation may be damaged clearly need alleviating.

Yet the grisly fact is that as yet more loans are granted even though now without conditions vast profits are to be made. Ukrainian bonds are trading at about 25 cents in a dollar, and so if repayments continue, hedge funds and banks are set to make profits of more than 300%. That the profit margins of the already obscenely rich are being inflated by the bloody slaughter of civilians should surely be a cause of universal revulsion and sufficient impetus to action.

But if the IMF and World Bank cancel Ukraines debt, critics may ask, doesnt that mean less money in the pot to lend to other poorer countries? But theres a straightforward solution: richer countries, like our own, should contribute more to make up the shortfall. There is a precedent of sorts the G20s debt service suspension initiative suspended or cancelled nearly $11bn of poorer countries external debt because of Covid-19. If a pandemic is reason enough to write off debt, surely a war of aggression is too.

When this all ends hopefully in failure for Putin then Ukraine will need a modern-day Marshall plan, made up of grants, not a reconstruction financed by loans. In terms of the current moment, as the Jubilee Debt Campaign suggests, there should be a mechanism to automatically suspend debt repayments for countries suffering severe external shocks. Ukraine is in the midst of existential crisis as the Ukrainian social scientist Volodymyr Ishchenko told me: Personally, it feels like the country in which I was born may simply disappear. A country battered and bruised by war needs space to breathe. Thats in our power: cancel the debt.

Original post:

Theres an easy way to help Ukraine without military escalation: cancel its foreign debt - The Guardian

Recently, at a closed ski resort in Ukraines Carpathian Mountains, Roman Davydov leaned into a microphone and announced the latest news from the war. Kryvyi Rih, in southern Ukraine, was being attacked; a U.S. journalist had been shot; and the British Foreign Secretary had announced new sanctions on Russian oligarchs in London. Davydov, who is forty-three, with dark hair and an oft-furrowed brow, is the voice of Kraina FM, an independent radio station that, after Russian bombing began in Kyiv, relocated to an undisclosed location. (The staff of Kraina FM asked me not to identify the village, for security reasons.) Outside Davydovs improvised booth, a corner office lent to Kraina FM by a local accountant, an odd sense of normalcy reigned. Beyond the ski-rental shop, where a cluster of sandbags had been piled, a man in a blue jacket and ski goggles operated a small lift for a childrens slope in the bright sunshine.

The area, which is several hours south of Lviv, has become a shelter for displaced people, Bogdan Bolkhovetsky, Davydovs colleague, told me. Bolkhovetsky, Kraina FMs station general manager, said that he and Davydov had arrived in the village by pure chance. The west of the country is full of refugees, and there are few places for families to stay as they make their way toward the borders of Europe. We found this place because it was the only place vacant, Bolkhovetsky said. They arrived in the evening on February 27th; just days later they were setting up the station in a sloped-ceilinged, wood-panelled space that barely fit their two desks. They acquired laptops and a mixer from the supply of aid making its way from the rest of Europe to Ukraine. We called our friends in Austria and they were so quick, Bolkhovetsky said. Guys weve never met just sent us the equipment, and a friend of ours brought this equipment in. I mean, they brought us these German laptops and the mixing console and weve never seen these people before.

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Kraina FM is an independent radio station that grew out of a now defunct channel called Radio EU. Until the Russian invasion, the station mainly played Ukrainian rock and pop, although it also featured childrens programming and occasional news flashes that, when the channel was launched, in 2016, Davydov said would be the most independent among Kyivs radio stations. Kraina FM was more funny and easy, Davydov told me later, in an e-mail. Now its mostly just rock and not happy information. Like millions of other Ukrainians who have fled their homes, most of the stations staff left Kyiv after the fighting began. Everyone was scattered for two or three days, Bolkhovetsky told me. You look at Google Maps, you see the name of the city and you just start calling hotels to stay overnight.

Bolkhovetsky, who is forty-nine, had awoken from a terrible nightmare on February 24th, when he saw a news alertPutin addresses the nationand heard the first low thuds of Russian bombs exploding around the capital. I just started packing the bags, throwing everything in, he said. With his wife and nine-year-old son, he fled to a summer house outside Kyiv. Within days, Russian helicopters were attacking nearby. Some flew low enough for him to see the pilots in the cockpit. The faces look like you, he said. Just people on the job, like fucking robots. His son spent most of the day in the basement, still in his pajamas. At one point, when the helicopters flew off, Bolkhovetsky piled his family into the car. Once he had reached a town that was not being attacked, he called Davydov, and together they searched for a safe place to set up the station.

Davydov had fled Kyiv with his wife and three-year-old daughter, heading to his wifes office in central Kyiv, where they thought they would be safe. But Russian shelling forced them to seek shelter underground for days. Davydov had a microphone and a connector in the trunk of his car, a setup that he had previously used to record soccer news late at night for early-morning bulletins. Despite the shelling, Davydov kept the broadcasts going, recording one-man news items and uploading them remotely during pauses in the explosions. For two or three days we broadcast only with my one microphone, he said. In the background of these first recordings, one can hear children and dogsDavydov was recording them in the crowded shelter with his head enveloped in a plaid shirt to muffle the sound.

Both Bolkhovetsky and Davydov have spent most of their careers working in radio. Davydov studied economics, but, when he was eighteen, he started doing humor programs for a station in what is now called Kamianske, a city of more than two hundred thousand people on the Dnieper River, and never looked back. He has worked just about every job on the air sincecopywriter, traffic manager, music director, brand voices, program director. In 2004, he moved to Kyiv. Bolkhovetsky, who was born in Luhansk, an eastern region of Ukraine claimed by Russia-backed separatists, worked as an English and French teacher before going into radio in the late nineteen-nineties. He moved to Kyiv in 2005 and worked at a succession of different radio stations.

Once they got Kraina FM up and running at their mountain location, a representative from the National Council of Television and Radio Broadcasting in Ukraine requested that they play a national broadcast. Everybody else switched to the national station, Bolkhovetsky told me. It was a continuous broadcast of just one program on TV stations and everywhere. Bolkhovetsky and Davydov decided to continue their own programming. I mean, you tune in to any station and it is the same, Bolkhovetsky told me. Whats the point? Lets have one which is different. They decided to re-create Kraina FM as the station of national resistance.

At the moment, Kraina FM is broadcasting to some twenty cities and online. During the first week, the programming was almost exclusively news about the Russian advance. By the second week, the station had morphed into something profoundly different, cordinating humanitarian logistics and explaining which towns needed what. And a lighter side also crept into the programming. In the first week, we didnt think about something funny, Davydov said. And now its humor about Russiansaggressive humorpoetry, patriotic poetry, some little features about Ukrainians. They broadcast a famous Ukrainian Father Christmas telling childrens tales at night and a psychologist who gives advice for how to care for children during days marked by shelling and air strikestalk to them kindly, show love, listen, and dont contradict what the child says.

A network of around fifteen people, in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia, helps them put out Kraina FMs programs remotely. They use Ukrainian news agencies and the app Telegram to source and put together bulletins. The Internet connection is awful, and theyre often unable to upload stories and recordings. Usually, Kraina FMs programming reaches about a million people, but these days they have no idea how many people are listening. The person who would normally monitor that is likely still in Kyiv, presumably with more urgent matters to contemplate. Perhaps the real measure of the stations popularity has been its drives to locate supplies for the Ukrainian military, first responders, and other humanitarian groups. One day a television producer in Kyiv told them that the military needed a hundred laptops. Davydov and Bolkhovetsky announced the request on air. We made the announcement, like, every fifteen minutes or twenty minutes, Bolkhovetsky said. About two hours later, the military called back; they had enough laptops. Nevertheless, laptops continued to flood in. When I asked why they continued to produce the show, Bolkhovetsky pointed to this experience. What other reason do you need in this moment?

The ski village is something of a transit hub for people fleeing across the border. People come, people go, Bolkhovetsky told me. Thats how it works here.At a certain point, the time came for their own families to leavetheir wives and children had been anxiously spending their days in the resorts hotel rooms while Bolkhovetsky and Davydov got the station running. Both families fled to other parts of Europe. Its better to be by ourselves, Bolkhovetsky told me. They will take care of themselves and well take care of business and ourselves. Still, saying goodbye, he said, was terrible, like never before. Its not compared to anything in my life, to anything.

Under Ukraines current martial law, military reservists between the age of eighteen and sixty have to register to be conscripted into the Army, and all other men in that age group are not supposed to leave the country. Even if Bolkhovetsky and Davydov wanted to leave, they would not be able to. I asked Bolkhovetsky and Davydov whether, if called up, they would fight against the Russians. On one of their first days in the village, Bolkhovetsky told me, We went to the local military station and we said, We are here. What do you want us to do?

What can you do? the local soldiers asked them.

We can do radio, Bolkhovetsky replied.

On hearing this, the unit chief looked at him. So go and make radio, he said.

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Ukraines Radio Station of National Resistance - The New Yorker

After two years of political divisions and economic disruptions bolstered by an unending pandemic, many Americans say they are coming together around a common cause: support for Ukraine, a country under daily siege by Russian forces.

The rare moment of solidarity is driven, in part, by the perception of America as a steadfast global defender of freedom and democracy. Many Americans say they see a lopsided fight pitting a great power against a weaker neighbor. They see relentless images of dead families and collapsed cities. They see Ukraines president pleading for help.

In polls and interviews since the attack, Americans across the political spectrum said the nation had a duty to respond to President Vladimir V. Putins brazen invasion even if that means feeling, at least in the short term, the pinch of high gas prices and inflation.

I understand we want to stay out of it, but whats happening is worse than anyone could imagine. We can do without gas when there are children there being killed, said Danna Bone, a 65-year-old retiree in McMinnville, Ore., and a Republican. Its horrific whats happening there, and we need to be doing our part. I would like to see them doing more. What that looks like, I really dont know.

Yet interviews with more than three dozen Americans from Georgia to California show that, beyond broad consensus that Ukraine deserves support, they are unsettled and even divided on essential questions: How far should America go to defend Ukraine without thrusting the nation into another Cold War? Does the war demand U.S. military involvement?

The Biden administration has imposed an array of painful economic sanctions on Russia and blocked its oil, gas and coal imports. The administration has already approved $1.2 billion in aid to Ukraine, and President Biden is expected to announce another $800 million in military assistance. Three weeks into the invasion, most Americans in both political parties support U.S. aid to Ukraine and overwhelmingly support economic sanctions, a new Pew Research Center survey found.

Already, the issue of Americas role in Ukraine is scrambling U.S. politics and reinvigorating the bond between the United States and its European allies.

About a third of Americans said the United States was providing the appropriate amount of support to Ukraine, but an even larger share, 42 percent, is in favor of the country doing even more, the Pew survey showed. The same poll found, however, that about two-thirds of Americans do not support military intervention.

In pockets across the country, how people saw Americas global might and obligations was often influenced by their individual circumstances and economic stability. They often drew a line, if a crooked one, between the war and the crises at home. Conversations about Russian strikes and shellshocked refugees fleeing Ukraine quickly gave way to discussion about the personal cost of gas and food, a sputtering economy and the enduring pain of the pandemic, the kind of grievances that might temper support for Ukraine over time.

North of Detroit, where Macomb and Oakland Counties sit side by side but have been moving in opposite political directions in recent years Macomb to the right, Oakland to the left liberals and conservatives are united in a belief that what is happening in Ukraine is wrong and that the United States could be doing more. But they offered divergent opinions on the causes of the war or whether Mr. Biden has been adept at handling the foreign policy crisis.

I call it Russias unfinished business, Roland Benberry Jr., 61, an artist and illustrator, said of the invasion. Mr. Benberry served in the Air Force in the early 1980s when Russia was considered an imminent threat. Thirty years later, he is experiencing those feelings again. We thought we were done with that, he said. We thought the Soviet Union was gone, and it basically just went underground for a while.

Mr. Benberry, a Democrat who lives in Oakland County, believes that sanctions could be the most powerful and effective tool against Russia, and that the U.S. military should only get involved directly if the Ukrainian military is forced to fall back. He saw Mr. Putin as a lone demagogue acting on his own, against the will of many of his own citizens.

Like Mr. Benberry, Natasha Jenkins, 34, a Democrat and a liberal arts student at a community college in Oakland County, said she was willing to tolerate higher gas prices to punish Mr. Putin. But she said she wished Mr. Biden would also push for higher wages so that people could have an easier time making ends meet. She sees firsthand the impact of Americas economic strains in the grocery store, where she works the night shift as a cashier. Parents complain to her about the expensive prices of produce or the burdens of teaching their children at home amid the pandemic. Some supplies shortages linger, and she cannot keep all the shelves stocked.

Ms. Jenkins said she was reluctant to see direct U.S. military involvement in Ukraine. She has several close friends still scarred from Americas wars in the Middle East, she said, and she does not want to see more American soldiers deployed to fight abroad.

Indeed, for many Americans, the support for Ukraine firmly ends at the doorstep of military intervention. History plays a role. The long-running war and pullout from Afghanistan, along with memories of the first Cold War, has dampened the tolerance for a direct confrontation with Russia.

On a suburban street in Macomb County, Kathleen Pate, 75, has helped to organize donated clothing and medication to be sent to Ukraine. Her son and her daughter-in-law, who is from Ukraine, converted their garage into a makeshift donation hub.

The support is overwhelming, said Ms. Pate, a Republican who has spent her recent days worrying about Ukrainian families. I cant sleep at night. I cant get it out of mind.

She said she supported establishing a no-fly zone over Ukraine and had been unhappy with the U.S. response so far. I truly believe that it could be doing more to help, she said. It is the humane thing to do.

An Economist/YouGov survey conducted in early March showed that a majority of Americans, about 73 percent, sympathized more with Ukraine than Russia. The poll also showed that 68 percent approved of imposing economic sanctions, and slightly less approved of sending financial aid or weapons. But only 20 percent favored sending American troops to fight Russians in Ukraine.

Alejandro Tenorio, 24, said sanctions ought to be the primary tool to force Mr. Putin to back down, and maybe motivate the Russian people to act.

I think these political sanctions should continue. Let the people from Russia take matters into their own hands to maybe try to change the government and change their ways, said Mr. Tenorio, a tech support specialist for a data company who described himself as a left-leaning moderate.

The Biden administration, said Mr. Tenorio, who lives in Johns Creek, Ga., could be a bit more aggressive, with more things to hurt their economy.

I think that should be about it, he said. I think Biden is doing as much as he can, or as much as hes allowed to do.

Others believe that American troops on the ground are a dangerous but necessary response.

Dan Cunha is a 74-year-old Vietnam veteran and retired small business owner who lives in Anaheim, Calif. He describes himself as a political independent, and wrote in John Kasich, the Republican former governor of Ohio, in the 2020 election.

It breaks my heart to see what is happening there now, to see an autocrat rise to power, and were not doing anything to stop it, he said. He is nationalist in the extreme. If it were up to me, I would put troops there. Putin is a bully, and bullies need to be slapped back.

Mr. Cunha regularly spends time at the local V.F.W. outpost, where most of his friends are what he describes as die-hard Republicans, and said that many argue that the conflict would not have happened at all if Donald J. Trump were still president.

The majority of the veterans I talk to say the same thing as I do boots on the ground, he said.

While supportive of Ukraines plight, some Middle Eastern refugees and immigrants outside of Detroit said this conflict felt different from those in Afghanistan and Iraq, because the world is paying attention to the suffering of white European families in a way they felt that it had not with their own.

I grew up watching my country get torn apart, said Maria, a Syrian college student who asked that her full name not be used for fear of endangering her family still in the country. She emphasized that she felt and understood Ukrainians pain, and that she herself had been stunned to see Europeans go to war. But she said she hoped that Americans would realize that this is what life had been like for people in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries for decades.

The war feels personal for Maryana and Radion Vacarciuc, a young Ukrainian couple who have been living in the United States with their children for the last three years but still have relatives in Ukraine.

They are pained by the predicament of their homeland and family members and recall the last conflict in 2014 but said they recognize the limitations of the U.S. government.

America is its own country, Mr. Vacarciuc said. Ukraine, Russia, theyre fighting their own battles.

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Russias Ukraine Invasion Rallies a Divided Nation: The United States - The New York Times

Eleven Ukrainian political parties have been suspended because of their links with Russia, according to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The countrys national security and defence council took the decision to ban the parties from any political activity. Most of the parties affected were small, but one of them, the Opposition Platform for Life, has 44 seats in the 450-seat Ukrainian parliament.

The activities of those politicians aimed at division or collusion will not succeed, but will receive a harsh response, Zelenskiy said, in a video address on Sunday.

Therefore, the national security and defence council decided, given the full-scale war unleashed by Russia, and the political ties that a number of political structures have with this state, to suspend any activity of a number of political parties for the period of martial law, the Ukrainian leader added.

The Opposition Platform for Life, Ukraines biggest opposition party, is led by Viktor Medvedchuk, a pro-Moscow oligarch with close ties to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Party officials later said the suspension had no legal basis.

The Ukrainian authorities last year charged Medvedchuk, a longtime ally of Putin who is believed to be the godfather of Medvedchuks daughter, with treason and placed the oligarch under house arrest, a move that angered the Kremlin.

Ukraine said Medvedchuk escaped house arrest three days after Russia started its invasion of Ukraine on 24 February and his whereabouts are currently unknown.

The list of parties banned on Sunday also included the Nashi (Ours) party led by Yevhen Murayev, as well as a number of smaller parties not represented in the parliament. Prior to the start of the war, unspecified British intelligence claimed that Russia was considering installing Murayev to lead a Kremlin-controlled puppet government in Kyiv, claims that Murayev strongly denied.

Ukraines decision to suspend a number of parties was slammed by senior Russian officials on Sunday, with the chair of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, saying it was another mistake made by Zelenskiy that will divide the country, while ex-president and top security official Dmitry Medvedev sarcastically wrote that the move would bring Ukraine closer to the west.

The most democratic president of modern Ukraine has taken another step towards the western ideals of democracy. By decision of the Council for National Defence and Security, he completely banned any activity of opposition parties in Ukraine. They are not needed! Well done! Keep it up, Medvedev wrote on his Telegram channel.

The political move comes as Zelenskiy aims to further assert his influence over the countrys media sphere. On Sunday, the Ukrainian leader signed a decree that aims to unite all national TV channels into one platform, citing the importance of a unified information policy under martial law.

Originally posted here:

Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to Russia - The Guardian

Tanya Kobzar stands in front of the Taras Shevchenko Monument in Lviv. When Ukraine went to war last month, Kobzar a 49-year-old mother of two decided to follow in her grandmother's footsteps and enlist in the army. Ryan Kellman/NPR hide caption

Tanya Kobzar stands in front of the Taras Shevchenko Monument in Lviv. When Ukraine went to war last month, Kobzar a 49-year-old mother of two decided to follow in her grandmother's footsteps and enlist in the army.

LVIV, Ukraine In the lead-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tanya Kobzar was having nightmares.

"I was waking up in the middle of the night, terrified. I would look at a black-and-white photo of my grandmother, which I have framed on a table," she recalls. "She reminds me of how brave a person can be."

Kobzar's late grandmother was an army medic in World War II. It's become part of the family lore how brave she was, treating soldiers on the front lines. So when Ukraine went to war again last month, Kobzar a 49-year-old mother of two decided to follow in her grandmother's footsteps. She left her office job in health care supply chains and enlisted in the army.

Tanya Kobzar's late grandmother was an army medic in World War II. It's become part of the family lore how brave she was, treating soldiers on the front lines. Tanya Kobzar hide caption

"I did this for my children and for my country," says Kobzar, who's using her military nickname in this NPR interview, rather than her full surname, for security reasons.

Her first stop was boot camp, where she learned how to fire a weapon. She found it surprisingly easy. "Easier than making borscht!" she says and laughs.

Now Kobzar is deployed at a military academy in the western city of Lviv, where she's teaching soldiers how to set up field hospitals. It's a training role. But many other Ukrainian women are on the front lines.

Under martial law, Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 are prohibited from leaving the country, and encouraged to fight. Women are under no such mandate. Still, many of them have nevertheless taken up arms against the Russians in this war, and in past ones.

Ukrainian women have actually been serving in combat almost a century longer than American women. There were female Ukrainian officers in World War I, in the Austro-Hungarian army, and in World War II, in the Red Army.

"The Bolsheviks and the Communist parties, they declared equality between men and women in all the spheres, including the military," says feminist historian Oksana Kis.

Despite that history though, it wasn't until after Russia's 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine that women enlisted here in the Ukrainian armed forces in huge numbers and were officially recognized as combat veterans, with full military pensions. Before conscription, nearly a quarter of Ukraine's military was female.

Some of the iconic images of the current war on propaganda posters and on social media are of female combatants. They're reminiscent of those of the women who fought in the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, of female Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka in the early 2000s and of Kurdish women fighting in Syria.

"It's very familiar iconography, when it comes to imagining a nation protecting herself fighting for her independence and freedom," Kis says.

Alina Mykhailova, 27, is a veteran of the 2014 war in eastern Ukraine who now serves on the Kyiv City Council. Earlier this year, she re-enlisted in the army and says she's seeing heavy combat. Alina Mykhailova hide caption

Alina Mykhailova, 27, is a veteran of the 2014 war in eastern Ukraine who now serves on the Kyiv City Council. Earlier this year, she re-enlisted in the army and says she's seeing heavy combat.

That's what Alina Mykhailova was doing when NPR reached her by phone on the front lines, somewhere in central Ukraine. She couldn't reveal her exact location. But her commander had given her permission to speak to the media and to post images of the war on social media. She'd recently posted a video on Instagram of incoming artillery.

Mykhailova, 27, is a veteran of the 2014 war in eastern Ukraine who now serves on the Kyiv City Council. Earlier this year, she re-enlisted in the army. And she says she's seeing heavy combat.

"We just burned a Russian tank. Actually, not just one! We wiped out their entire position!" she tells NPR. "Their tanks took a direct hit from our shells."

Her mother is especially worried: Mykhailova and her father are both in the same combat unit.

"I am the only woman in our unit, and it's difficult. Some of the soldiers we've lost are my friends my brothers-in-arms," Mykhailova says. "But as a woman, I'm cautious about showing too much emotion. I don't want to hurt the morale of our unit the combat spirit of the guys."

The combat spirit in Ukraine right now appears to be pretty robust. Only men face conscription. But lots of them haven't even been called up yet, because the military has already been inundated with volunteers of all genders.

"They said, 'OK, you will be in a line. But now we have too many people,' " says Olga Limarenko, about her experience trying to volunteer at her local branch of Ukraine's territorial defense force in Kyiv.

She and her girlfriends went together, but were turned away. Officials said they didn't need anyone else at the moment. So Limarenko, a 36-year-old architect who has since relocated to Lviv, decided to contribute another way: by making Molotov cocktails to deliver to Ukrainian cities under Russian occupation.

"During the last week, we made about 1,000 of them," she says.

NPR met Limarenko at a library in Lviv that had been transformed into a bustling command center for volunteers mostly women making Molotov cocktails and camouflage nets. She says she'd fight in combat if asked. But for now, she says, make no mistake about the commitment of Ukrainian women to this war.

"We are not weak. We are just waiting," Limarenko says.

Waiting for a spot to open in Ukraine's military, she says so that they can fight.

Producer Olena Lysenko also contributed to this report.

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Ukrainian women are volunteering to fight, continuing a tradition - NPR

The relentless violence in Ukraine could not be further from Danica Joysdottir's rural hometown of Kendenup in WA's Great Southern region.

While she had no family connection to Ukraine, Ms Joysdottir decided she could not just watch the war unfold from afar.

So, sheflew to Ukraine, ignoring the federal government's warning not to travel to the country.

Leaving her concerned partner and a four-year-old son at home, Ms Joysdottir said she would not have been able to live with herself if she did not act.

Through the Ukraine embassy, Ms Joysdottir has signed up to the so-called foreign legion the result of a call to arms from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"All friends of Ukraine who want to join the defence, come and we will give you arms," Mr Zelenskyy said last month.

Ms Joysdottir's partner described her journey as "stupid and selfish" and she agreed.

"He's absolutely right," she said.

"It's obviously stupid to take yourself into a war zone and selfish because I'm walking away from my life to follow my heart."

She said knowing her son was safe butUkrainian children were in danger helped formher decision.

"What if we were the ones getting bombed? I would want someone to come and help," she said.

Ms Joysdottir hoped to be assignedas a medic in the war zone, having held volunteer positions as an ambulance officer, lifeguard and fire fighter in Canada and Australia.

"I would rather not kill anybody, but the number one stance is to defend the people who are being attacked," she said.

"I'll do whatever needs to be done."

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has issued a 'do not travel' notice for Ukraine the highest of the four travel warning levels.

Speaking last month, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the Australian law was unclear on people joining the newly established legion.

"Our law sets out arrangements where people can be involved in official activity by a sovereign state which Ukraine obviously qualifies for," he said.

However, Mr Morrison said the parameters of President Zelenskyy's foreign legion wasn't fully understood.

"The nature of these arrangements are very uncertain," he said.

"At this time the legalities of such actions are uncertain under Australian law."

DFAT has been contacted for comment.

Originally posted here:

WA woman in Ukraine to join foreign legion and fight Russia, and hopes to work as a medic - ABC News