About 7,000 women in Ukraine currently have the status of participants in hostilities, and 116 were presented with state awards, four of them posthumously, according to Inna Zavorotko, a representative of the Directorate of Legal Support of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“About 7,000 female soldiers were part of the Ukrainian forces in Donbas and received the status of a combatant, which is 3 percent of the total number of personnel. During the Donbas war, 116 women were given state awards, and four of them posthumously. Over 2,000 women were awarded the insignia of merit the Defense Ministry and the General Staff,” Zavorotko said at a briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday.
She also noted that over the previous year, over 3,000 Ukrainian women signed contracts with the Armed Forces.
According to her, more than 24,000 women are currently serving in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and over 3,000 of them are officers. There are 31,000 women working in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, including employees of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and civil servants.
“Thus, the total number of women who work and serve in the Ukrainian army is about 56,000 persons, that is 22.4 percent of all personnel. For comparison, this figure is 22 percent in France, 15 percent in Canada, 14 percent in Spain, about 10 percent in the UK, and 10 percent in German,” Zavorotko said.
