Women and Ukraine’s Economics of War and Peace

Ukraine’s war effort relies heavily on its women. While tens of thousands of women have volunteered to serve in the armed forces and fight Russia’s invasion, millions of civilian women maintain the country’s war economy by serving as a flexible workforce: filling the gaps left by mobilised men as well as continuing the everyday, reproductive labour that sustains households and civil society. But while the government in Kyiv needs women to do this work, it also needs the continued flow of funding from international financial institutions and national governments in the West. To satisfy its international donors, Ukraine’s political leaders need to demonstrate their commitment to Western, liberal values and to capitalism, as well as to gender equality. This is an important source of contradictory pressures. Ukraine’s government’s neoliberal economic policies shift the balance towards privatisation, reducing workers’ rights and protections in law and diminishing the capacity of the state to support the very women on whom it relies during war. The chapter draws on insights from feminist security studies and feminist political economy to explore these contradictory pressures on women in wartime Ukraine and their (in)visibility in plans for the country’s postwar reconstruction.