Anna Nemtsova profiles the female militants taking part on both sides of the civil conflict:
Women build barricades, pour gas for Molotov cocktails, or throw bricks at policemen — sometimes with more passion and anger than the men. On the Maidan, some of them joined Unit 39, a largely female group within the demonstrators’ Self-Defense Forces, where their tasks included persuading members of Berkut, the paramilitary police, to defect. Last month, activist Irma Krat, one of the leaders of the Maidan’s female militia forces, was detained by rebels in Sloviansk. The interrogators have accused her of torturing anti-Maidan activists and killing a Berkut officer.
But the pro-Ukrainian contingent certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on women militants. Since late April, leaders of the separatist movement have been calling on both men and women to mobilize and prepare for a real war against Kiev. Last weekend, a pro-Russian website issued a video that showed four masked women warriors from Lugansk declaring “a war against the junta,” as pro-Russian forces refer to the interim government in Kiev. In the video, women dressed in camouflage with Kalashnikov rifles slung across their chests introduce themselves as female fighters in the Russian Orthodox Army: “We took up weapons because we’re fed up,” one of the women says.
It’s not just young women, either. Last week, Julia Ioffe took a look at the role grandmothers (baby, plural of baba) were playing in separatist movements in eastern Ukraine:
Baby were reportedly deployed in April outside Slovyansk, where the Ukrainian government’s troops, in a massive embarrassment to the provisional government in Kiev, surrendered their tracked and armored personnel carriers, as well as their assault rifles, to the rebels.
How did it happen?
The machinery rolls in, and a battalion of grannies surround it, hectoring and jeering at the young men in Ukrainian uniform, shaming them for coming to kill them. The Ukrainian soldiers were not going to shoot or plow through unarmed babushki, so they sat there and waited while the grannies hooted and hollered. But before the soldiers knew it, their men arrived, with guns, and the game was lost.
Just last week, Russian state media reported that, outside Slavyansk, Ukrainian troops were again turned back by the granny shock troops. When the Dniepropetrovsk unit had stopped outside town, it was surrounded by baby, cooing at the young soldiers. Then they fed them cakes packed with sedatives, and when the soldiers fell asleep the separatists came and captured their weaponry.
The Dish 