Ukrainian witch:this work of art is In the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or fewer: courtesy of Wikimedia.

The Atlantic reports on The Warrior-Witches of Ukraine’s Resistance:   Excerpt:

For Roksana and some of the other women operatives I spoke with, the determination to destroy the Russian occupation was forged in dark experience. “Almost every day, for the first few weeks after the invasion, we would hear about another body in the street,” Roksana said. “If it was a woman, they were often abused.” The doctor Tetyana Kostyantynivna runs the women’s center at one of Kyiv’s largest hospitals. In 2022 and 2023, her facility treated a steady stream of sexual-assault survivors from the occupied territories, ranging in age from 4 to 75. …

During her own escape, Roksana passed through 33 Russian checkpoints, several of which were surrounded by dead bodies. Some of those corpses were of women and showed what she understood to be clear signs of sexual violence. At one checkpoint, a Russian soldier fired into the back of Roksana’s car while it sat parked, hitting a passenger in the legs. The soldiers did it for sport. But Roksana’s group made it through, and today, she has no reservations about guiding drone strikes against her own village, if doing so helps drive the Russians out. “We can rebuild warehouses,” she said, “but the Russians can’t rebuild Russians.”

Women are crucial to the Ukrainian resistance. “They can go places, do things, that men cannot,” Andriushchenko, who runs agents inside Mariupol, told me. “Also, they are ruthless.” Several resistance leaders call their female agents vidma, a term that appears often in Ukrainian folklore. Its closest translation is “witch,” but it has a very different connotation here. The word derives from vidate, which means “to know.” Lesia Orobets, a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament, explained: “Vidmas were wise. They understood the secrets of the surrounding environment. Here in Ukraine, our vidmas were respected for their knowledge, not burned for it.”

Slava Ukraine!