Women Ukraininan troops on parade, by spoilt.exile from Kiev, Ukraine courtesy of wikimedia, creative commons license Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

The National Interest reports on how important women troops are to Ukraine’s defense.  Excerpt:

When Russia invaded Ukraine, millions fled, but many Ukrainian women ran toward the fight.  They are now the engineers building drones, the volunteers evacuating civilians under shelling, the tech workforce increasingly fueling Ukraine’s drone revolution, and the young drone pilots striking Russian forces.

Their role is becoming increasingly important as the conflict saps Ukraine’s manpower amid broader mobilization challenges. A 2025 labor market assessment found that half of the surveyed companies planned to hire women for traditionally male-dominated roles in 2026. In wartime Ukraine, women are playing an increasingly important role in sustaining the country’s broader defense mobilization.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Lyuba Shipovich lived comfortably in the United States. She was a successful software engineer and fintech entrepreneur planning a European expansion. With the invasion, she took her technical talents to help Ukraine leverage technology to defend itself.

Shipovich co-founded Dignitas, an organization that supports military technology development for the Ukrainian army and helps train soldiers on drones and ground robotics. Through partnerships with major Ukrainian retailers, Dignitas has also helped fund the full training and equipping of female drone operators, who are then deployed with their own operational drone kits. “They break old ideas about who belongs on the battlefield,” wrote a Dignitas blog post.

…

Another key figure behind Ukraine’s drone revolution is Maria Berlinska, a co-founder of Dignitas and the driving force behind the Victory Drones initiative. A former aerial reconnaissance operator who volunteered in the war in Donbas, Berlinska has become one of Ukraine’s leading voices on military modernization and women’s integration into the Ukrainian army. Dignitas Ukraine President Dmytro Kavun called Berlinska a “visionary and evangelist.”

Slava Ukraine!