On 8 March 2023, Worldwide Girls’s Day, Russian troopers had been handing out tulips and boughs of mimosa to ladies and ladies within the metropolis of Melitopol, southern Ukraine – a transfer designed to advertise pleasant relations between the occupiers and the inhabitants.
However the evening earlier than, somebody had been discreetly sticking posters to partitions and lamp-posts. They bore the picture of a younger Ukrainian lady, wearing a standard embroidered shirt, smashing a bouquet over a Russian soldier’s head. “I don’t need flowers,” learn the slogan. “I would like my Ukraine.”
This was one of many earliest acts of a ladies’s resistance motion in Russian-occupied Ukraine that claims a whole lot of members, from Crimea within the south to the Luhansk area within the east.
The motion known as Zla Mavka, which, when roughly translated, means “depraved forest spirit”. The mavky of Ukrainian mythology are feminine supernatural beings who tempt males to their doom.
Utilizing the determine of the mavka is a twofold joke: it’s a reference to a preferred drama by early-Twentieth-century Ukrainian feminist Lesya Ukrainka; and is a play on the truth that Ukrainians typically discuss with the Russian navy as “orcs”, the brutish fighters in JRR Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. “Orc isn’t any match for mavka,” reads one of many motion’s posters.
The ladies concerned within the community undertake small acts of sabotage and resistance: disseminating a Ukrainian news-sheet; burning Russian propaganda; or dropping faux Russian rouble notes within the streets.
“We piss off the occupiers, give them a headache and don’t allow them to overlook that they’re occupiers right here,” one of many founders of the motion stated in an interview from Russian-occupied southern Ukraine by way of a messaging app.
When curious passersby decide up certainly one of Zla Mavka’s sham 2,000 rouble notes, they are going to discover it bearing not, as anticipated, the picture of the Russky Bridge that connects Vladivostok with Russky Island in Russia’s far east, however as a substitute the Crimean Bridge between Russia and Crimea in the mean time it was hit with a Ukrainian bomb in October 2022.
The true Crimea-themed 200 rouble notice was issued by the Financial institution of Russia in 2017, three years after Russia’s unlawful annexation of the peninsula, and exhibits the archaeological web site of Chersonesus close to Sevastopol, and on the opposite facet, the early Twentieth-century Monument to Sunken Ships in Sevastopol Bay.
On Zla Mavka’s faux model, although, a Ukrainian flag is seen rising among the many classical ruins. Flip it over and the Russian battleship Moskva sinks into the Black Sea. The cruiser went down in April 2022, with Ukraine saying it focused it with missiles.
Girls share pictures of acts of resistance, in addition to accounts of their each day life below occupation, on the Zla Mavka channel on the Telegram app. To maintain one another secure, they’re nameless, even to one another.
The Guardian was not in a position independently to confirm the veracity of the accounts revealed on the channel, however they bear the hallmarks of separate accounts of life below Russian occupation. Recognisable landmarks seem within the background of a few of the pictures.
Phrase of the motion’s actions is step by step spreading in free Ukraine. Zla Mavka function in a touring exhibition, Unseen Pressure, highlighting non-violent resistance to the Russian invasion, in Kyiv, Lviv and, till 5 January, in Dnipro. It opens in Odesa in February.
The ladies regularly make use of darkish humour. “There are two sides to this,” stated the co-founder, who requested to be recognized solely as Mavka for security causes. “First, we ourselves want this humour, as a result of with out it you possibly can merely go loopy right here. And then again, it actually infuriates the Russian occupiers.”
Spreading pro-Ukrainian data below occupation is harmful, and has turn into extra in order time goes on. The proliferation of surveillance cameras in Russian-occupied cities has made placing up posters significantly perilous.
“After all we’re afraid,” stated Mavka. “Everybody understands the dangers very effectively and understands what might threaten them within the occasion of publicity. We attempt to be very cautious and warn all our activists about all the principles. Each lady understands what she is doing and everybody makes her selection.”
The early posters, from spring 2023, featured a particular illustrated character: a long-haired, smiling younger woman sporting a standard Ukrainian flower garland, accompanied by numerous slogans: “Let’s take the Russian garbage out,” for instance. In more moderen months, the motion has included the easy Zla Mavka image – a triangle surmounted by a sunburst – pinned to the wall of the foyer of an condo block.
“We wished it to be easy, initially, in order that it might be simple to attract in tough circumstances,” stated Mavka of the image. “It needed to have a feminine kind, after which we added the solar that will positively rise over Ukraine when Russia misplaced.”
Girls contact the motion by writing within the first occasion to a chatbot. Materials seems on the publicly viewable Telegram channel solely after it’s checked, so far as attainable, for authenticity and screened for data that would compromise the ladies’s identities. The diaries revealed on the Telegram channel are accompanied by drawings supplied by a supporter of the motion in free Ukraine.
The accounts of each day life despatched in by the ladies are revealing. One lady in Yalta, Crimea, posted this October about making ready her condo for rental. “I can’t afford to take dangers. Books in Ukrainian, about Ukrainian artwork, a historical past textbook in English, international magazines about feminist and queer artwork, all this must be put away earlier than strangers enter the home,” she wrote.
Assessing the diploma of resistance in occupied areas is tough. Because the diary entries recount, faculties have now launched Russian curricula, and plenty of households from Russia have moved into the occupied areas. One diary describes the proliferation – on public transport, on vehicles, on buildings – of the letter Z, the Russian image of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Tough topics are raised within the diaries, comparable to Ukrainian males being mobilised into the Russian military. “I’m writing to you, ladies, and crying,” a girl from an occupied a part of the Zaporizhzhia area wrote in February this yr. “They took my son. Informed him that he was going to serve within the navy … it seems that he could be handled like a traitor anyway, by both Ukrainians or Russians.
“My conscience punished me severely,” she added, “as a result of he advised me to flee, and I stated I had nobody to go away with the cows. And I thought-about myself too outdated to go wherever. And he stayed with me. And now I’m crying, and don’t know what to do.”
One of many motion’s helpers from free Ukraine, who requested to be recognized, for security causes, solely as Olha, stated: “They perceive one another’s each day issues. And that’s why ladies began to affix them. It has turn into increasingly more of a ladies’s neighborhood, not solely a resistance motion.
“This not some particular companies operation, it’s not one thing navy, it’s from lady to lady – lady below occupation to ladies below occupation.”
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