When Lesya Vasylenko was given a gun to defend herself and her country against the Russian army, she realised that she would have to cut off her beautiful long fingernails. “That was a tragedy for me,” said the Ukrainian MP, “because I have been fighting for 34 years of my life the habit of biting my nails. I was so proud that I was finally able to kick that habit and grow my nails and then the universe says ‘no’ to you through Vladimir Putin, who decides to attack your country and forces you and your fellow citizens into self-defence and then you have to pick up a gun and in order to be able to use it you have to cut your nails.”
It is the small details that reveal the day-to-day reality of war.
Vasylenko, who has three children — an eight-year-old, a six-year-old and a nine-month-old — would always prefer to have a manicure than a machinegun. She has still not deleted the reminders on her phone to book a yoga class and sign the kids up to swimming lessons. Even in the air raid shelter she wants to look her best and is always immaculate for her television interviews.
“Since that five o’clock call from my colleagues to switch on the TV and watch Putin’s announcement of war I have been putting make-up on every single morning and taking it off every single night,” she said. “It’s a must, we’re still civilised people”.
The human rights lawyer studied at University College London and is the daughter of Volodymyr Vasylenko, the former Ukrainian ambassador to the UK. She is armed and ready to fight. Her father-in-law taught her how to fire a Kalashnikov and showed her how to load the bullets into a semi-automatic pistol. “To use a real gun is something that came as a surprise to many of us,” she said. “You have to have a lot of strength in your fingers to be able to use it properly. It took me a while to get used to that.” If it comes to it, she believes that she will be able to shoot to kill. “At the point where there is imminent danger then yes — you do not think.”
Vasylenko’s first-hand account of the conflict on Twitter is both hard-hitting and heartbreaking. This week she posted photographs of children killed in the war: eight-year-old Tanya, who died of dehydration in Mariupol; six-year-old Sofiyka, shot with her baby brother in a car; and the bloodied body of a boy in a T-shirt. To the global leaders including Boris Johnson who have refused to back a no-fly zone over Ukraine, she had the stark message: “DON’T YOU DARE look away from the consequences.”
The day before we spoke a maternity hospital had been bombed and Russia had admitted to using thermobaric vacuum weapons. “These are atrocities of war but I don’t think even that describes it,” she told me in a Skype call. “No words will do justice to what is going on here on the ground and this is why I choose to share pictures. They are trying to exterminate us as a nation and this amounts to genocide. The world needs to know what’s really going on in Ukraine and the children who have died deserve to have their stories told. They are not just numbers of deaths and casualties. They are real people, with real lives which didn’t happen as they should have because they died at the hands of Putin and his missiles and rockets and bombs.”
Vasylenko was elected in 2019 for the liberal Holos party and is part of the opposition in the Ukrainian parliament but all MPs are now fully behind President Zelensky. As an MP, Vasylenko has been warned that she is likely to be a target for the Russian army. “We were told that it is not recommended for us to stay where we live, so after we voted through martial law and collected our weapons, I came home, picked up my husband and children and moved,” she explained calmly. War followed them wherever they went. “The sirens started, the bombing started. One morning I woke up to the news that the building where my godson’s school is located was hit in the night. You live hour by hour, you make decisions for safety, for your own sake, and for your loved ones. But every single day, you have doubts. Was it right? Was it not right? It’s like living on a rollercoaster. You’re thinking, ‘OK, I’m safe for now’ but I am staying God knows where, God knows for how long. And I think this insecurity about the time frame is what is really psychologically difficult for many Ukrainians.”
Eventually Vasylenko decided to send her children to stay with her sister abroad. “On the third day of war the sirens started going off. I got my kids down into the basement, and I realised that this is not something I want them to witness in their life ever. This is proper war. There’s no school, you can’t go to the park because you don’t know when the sirens are going to start. They ask you, ‘Oh Mummy it’s the weekend, let’s go for brunch’, and you have to explain to them that when we are in a war, it means that there are no hot chocolates in the park on Sunday.”
Each of her children reacted differently to the conflict. “My baby gets nervous when I get nervous so I figured out that with her, you just smile, and you have to play with her all the time. She’s been a lifesaver because she allows you to forget that you’re at war for a couple of minutes. You have to act normal, you have to act happy, otherwise she starts crying.”
Her six-year-old daughter has been remarkably sanguine about the explosions and the panic. “She can talk about it. She’s making all these plans, ‘If they come into the house, then we’re going to shoot them.’ She’s a fighter. She looks on the situation as very exciting — all the travel that she has had to do. She’s got the positivity.”
Her son, who is eight, is traumatised. “For him, this is so stressful,” she said. “He doesn’t want to ask, he doesn’t want to be told. He knows it’s war. He knows people die. He is the child that I’m most concerned about. Now he’s got pneumonia and I can’t be with him. I don’t know if he’s still at home or if they’ve taken him to hospital.”
It must be agonising to be separated from her children but she never seriously considered fleeing with them. “To be honest, I don’t think that I would be a very good mother right now in the traditional sense, because all my thoughts are constantly with Ukraine.” Is she frightened? “I don’t know how to answer that,” she replied. “Sometimes anxiety creeps in, but it’s never just anxiety that you feel, it’s also the will to live, and the will to survive. It comes with a lot of anger so it’s never alone this feeling of fear. Of course it’s there. It’s impossible not to be there when you hear the sirens all the time, when you read the reports of what is happening, when you know that your city is going to be encircled. That induces fear, but it also induces determination.”
Resilience is “part of the national character”, she said. “Ukraine is still independent. The government hasn’t capitulated. So we’re not a victim. We are a fighter and we are a very strong fighter as it proves to be to everyone’s surprise. We stand together in times of danger. When there is somebody trying to suppress us, Ukranians always unite and always fight.
“The love of freedom is in our genes, since the Cossack times.” She thinks it is no coincidence that many women have, like her, taken up arms to defend their country. “In Western movies we are often portrayed as light headed, pretty things, gold-diggers or whatever. The stereotypes are there, but they don’t do justice to the women of Ukraine. Yes, they like to look good but at the same time, the women of Ukraine are educated, they are smart, they are strong.”
This week Vasylenko took a huge risk. She travelled 23 hours from Kyiv to Strasbourg to meet a delegation of female MPs in the European parliament. She took the long, winding country roads to avoid Russian tanks. “Each one of us has just one suitcase with a pair of jeans, a couple of tops. I don’t even have anything appropriate to wear,” she said. “It’s so calm here but I realised yesterday going to bed that I hear aeroplanes fly over and I immediately run to the window to see whether it is a fighter jet.”
She finds it “painful and sickening” to be away from home as the bombs continue to fall but is determined to do all she can to persuade the West of the need for a
no-fly zone. “It’s as if the world is watching Ukraine like a movie with popcorn and making bets. ‘Will they or won’t they survive? How many more days?’ And I think that this is the kind of betrayal we weren’t expecting. All these lives lost are also their responsibility because it’s a failure to act. My question is how does it happen that such well-educated global leaders know so little of history?
And why is it that they are allowing for 1938 to repeat all over again?”
Zelensky invoked Winston Churchill in his address to the British parliament this week but Nato does not want to get dragged into a conflict with Russia, triggering a third world war. Vasylenko thinks that fear is exaggerated. “Russia does not have the capacity to fight Nato countries. Russia will always concentrate on Ukraine. Putin has a number of times, talked of the need to resolve the Ukrainian question. Does that ring any bells? For me, it does. There were a number of other questions, like the Jewish question, the Polish question, which were raised by a dictator by the name of Hitler.”
Does Vasylenko really think Ukraine can win? “Yes, we can,” she replied. “We have to do it. We have no choice. And I say this not in the kind of romantic way, but in a very realistic way. I want my children to live in an independent Ukraine and for that we fight every single day.”
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