Ukraine’s Secret Feminist Resistance Fighters
‘I don’t want flowers! I want my Ukraine back!’
Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made.
A woman pastes a sticker to a wall in Ukraine’s Russian occupied Crimea region that reads: “This is Ukraine.”
The sticker is in the Ukrainian language, a dangerous decision that is embedded within an even more dangerous act: offering hope in a place where citizens have little, where Russians have ruled their lives for over a decade — and where the simple act of affixing such a sticker could result in arrest, or torture.
The woman clandestinely offering this hope is part of a group of women partisans called Zla Mavka. They are named after a beautiful female forest spirit, a trickster, in Ukrainian folklore who lures men to their deaths by “tickling.” Makva “is the embodiment of female Ukrainian power and strength,” the group says.
Created in the occupied city of Melitopol in 2023 by three women, the resistance group has now grown to hundreds of anonymous women who communicate on the social media channel Telegram. Working online and on the ground, the women spread defiant posters and newsletters in occupied areas and burn Russian propaganda. Sometimes they pass information about Russian soldiers to the Ukrainian military. They even drop fake rubles and mix laxatives into food and alcohol served to Russian soldiers, a surprise known as the “Mavka cocktail,” according to The Kyiv Independent.
“We piss off the occupiers, give them a headache and don’t let them forget that they are occupiers here,” one of Zla Mavka’s founders, who asked to be called simply Mavka, told The Guardian. She also said that they “need this humor, because without it you can simply go crazy here. And on the other hand, it really infuriates the Russian occupiers.”
The group has a uniquely feminist origin story. It was the “insolence of Russian occupiers and their attitudes toward women” that inspired the women to create the group, one of the founders, known as Olesia, told the Independent. On Women’s Day in 2003, Russian troops lined the streets of Melitopol, offering tulips and sprigs of mimosa to Ukrainian women. But some women didn’t take kindly to the gesture. The three founders, clearly angry, put up posters saying, “I don’t want flowers! I want my Ukraine back!” with a drawing of a woman hitting a Russian soldier with a bouquet.
Zla Mavka’s website says that the “activists benefit from the ingrained misogyny of occupation forces who never suspect that women can play such an active role in resistance.” The group’s logo shows three women. The mythological spirit Mavka is in the middle, in traditional Ukrainian dress. Two women surround her: one brandishes a rolling pin and the other is wearing a kind of Angelina-Jolie-in-“Tomb-Raider” outfit.
Despite their bravery, their bravado and their good humor, the women of Zla Mavka are afraid.
“Of course we are afraid,” Mavka told The Guardian. “Everyone understands the risks very well and understands what could threaten them in the event of exposure. We try to be very careful and warn all our activists about all the rules. Every woman understands what she is doing and everyone makes her choice.”
As Olesia put it to the Independent: “You feel that you are doing something for which you will not be ashamed to look your children in the eyes, that you are helping, that you did not break.”
She cites a common Ukrainian saying that translates to: “The eyes are scared, but the hands are doing.”
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These brave women are doing whatever they can to show how much they love their country. They are fortunate to have a strong leader in Zelensky, who will not bow to pressure from spineless, but powerful others, like Trump and of course Putin. It seems as though we are not too far away from similar pressures from those who want to ban books, free speech and take away important civil liberties that are part of what has made our country great in the past.
I am in awe of these women. What an inspiration.