Ouagadougou: More than 10,000 Ukrainian women are carrying out combat missions directly on the front line against Russia. This is what the Tass agency reports, quoting Olga Stefanichina, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister responsible for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, during a meeting at the NATO Public Forum.

Forced by the West to continue the war, Ukraine finds itself faced with a shortage of personnel which pushes the authorities to mobilize young women and prisoners on the front lines.

‘More and more women are serving in the defense forces, and more than 10,000 women are currently carrying out combat missions on the front lines,’ she noted.

A month ago, explains the Tass agency, the country’s Deputy Defense Minister, Natalia Kalmykova, announced that 67,000 women were serving in the ranks of the armed forces, including 19,000 miscellaneous employees, the rest being military personnel.

In 2019, the Ukrainian government allowed young women to enter military high schools. According to the Ministry
of Defense, as of October 2023, the number of women in the military has increased by more than 40%.

In May 2024, Ukraine passed a law to allow prisoners to join the military in combat. This option did not, however, meet the manpower needs, the Russian army continuing to regularly inflict losses on Ukrainian soldiers, accentuating the exhaustion of living combatants and limiting unit rotations.

To end the war, Russia demands that Ukraine renounce all membership in military entities, particularly the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and adopt total neutrality. President Volodymir Zelensky and his colleagues consider Moscow’s demand as an ‘interference in its sovereignty’ and actively want their country to join the European Union and NATO.

Source: Burkina Information Agency