October 2015: residents of Kharkiv gather for the new "Day of the Defender" public holiday. (c) Pavel Pakhomenko / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.On 14 October, Ukraine will celebrate a new public holiday — the Day of the Defender of Ukraine. Announced six months after the outbreak of conflict in the Donbas in 2014, this new military holiday breaks the tradition of celebrating the Soviet “Day of the Defender of Fatherland” on 23 February.
The new date was chosen for a reason. For the Eastern Orthodox and Greek Catholic traditions, 14 October is the celebration of the feast of the Mother of God (Pokrova). The date also has a strong connection to the Ukrainian military: the feast day was popular with Ukraine’s Cossacks, and in the 1940s, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army adopted it as the symbolic day of their formation. President Petro Poroshenko, it seems, aims to emphasise a lineage of Ukrainian military service that isn’t connected to the Soviet army — highly relevant in the context of the ongoing conflict, which has actualised the symbolic connection between “Soviet” and “Russian” and with it a desire to break free of the Soviet past.
Yet there’s something missing here — the thousands of women who have defended and continue to defend Ukrainian statehood, both with weapons in their hands and otherwise. Even the 1,500 female soldiers who have served in the current conflict in Donbas do not feature in the official commemorations. Indeed, the very word “defender” (zakhysnyk) is almost exclusively used in its masculine grammatical form, even in the name of the holiday.
