Ukrainian female volunteers reveal radical forms of mobilizing that extend beyond immediate crisis response, challenging us to redefine what it means to care politically.
In my anthropological inquiries, I immersed myself in the world of small grassroots Ukrainian women’s organizations to explore how the women involved leverage personal resources and relationships to support their communities. These collectives, sometimes dubbed the “volunteering frontier,” bring together people from various walks of life: a kindergarten teacher, a pole-dance studio owner, an unemployed mother, an academic, and a refugee from a city that has become a ghost in the occupied lands. Their activities cover a wide range, from helping the displaced to organizing online counter-propaganda campaigns and anticorruption protests. They come with engaging strategies for grassroots fundraising as well as repairing and delivering pickup trucks to the frontlines, loaded with handwoven socks and masking nets, cigarettes, coffee, condensed milk, and—in smaller quantities—drones and thermal imagers. The list goes on. Many have been active since Russia’s occupation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014. Euromaidan was a catalyst for versatile independent grassroots movements, but even before 2014 some were mobilizing locally, on a smaller scale but with strong fervor to rectify issues faced by the struggling young state.
Over the last ten years, the activities of volunteering collectives across Ukraine have extend beyond simple acts of kindness or rapid responses to crises when state actors fall behind. Instead of aid-based help, their efforts are rooted in long-term relationship-building and the enactment of mutual responsibility. Ultimately, volunteer and activist projects are based on caring practices. This care is inherently political, as it is moulded and sustained by their awareness of the historical and political contexts. This awareness not only elucidates the necessity of additional community care but also directs grassroots strategic implementation.
This perspective—volunteering as political care—opens vast opportunities for scholars and activists to think of voluntarism not merely as isolated acts of aid but rather as part of a comprehensive, politically conscious society-building.
Knowledge of the Margins?
Ethics of care were historically linked to the “female” and “private” realms. Bolstered by diverse feminist scholarships, the concept of care has shed its marginalized status considerably over the past few decades. Today, the politics and ethics of care concern a broader spectrum of societal, legal, and institutional structures. In 2023, Olga Shparaga, in Feministische Politik und Fürsorge, brought attention to the crucial role of care infrastructures—whether state-provided or community-nurtured—as vital during turbulent times. She demonstrated how practices of care among activists were a driving force behind the 2020 protests in Belarus.
Yet, beyond the feminist sidelines, the full multifaceted potential of care as a transformative and even revolutionary power remains under-recognized. Many still essentialize care by categorizing it either as labor (commodity service, such as nursing, health care, and child care) or as an individual practice of support among kin relations. Unfortunately, thinkers who remain disengaged from the rich tapestry of feminist political projects, philosophies, and literature often continue to marginalize the concept of care. They perceive it as perhaps important and relevant for feminist or women’s issues, but not as an urgent concern for broader discourse, governance, and decision-making.
What Does It Mean To Be Political?
To clarify with the simple yet transgressive slogan of Carol Hanisch and American radical feminists: the personal is political. Being political is a process of self-reflection, and self-reflection provides an awareness of one’s entanglement in complex sociopolitical structures—and that of others. Therefore, politics in the work of Ukrainian volunteers is not primarily tied to their electoral commitments or left/right leanings. Instead, they are political in their commitments to explorations of their history and culture, to informally educating themselves and filling blank spots: about the imperial and colonial roots of the war, about the fate of Donbas, about why it used to be embarrassing to speak Ukrainian, about corruption during wartime, about what nationalism is, and about women in the army and among the Azov fighters. They unpack these stories in online and offline chats alongside their volunteering work. These stories help to explain motivations for their commitments and to engage people around them to join their causes. Some volunteers are inspired by the work of Soviet dissidents, of movements, and of liberation figures who resisted Russian/Soviet imperial domination in the 19th and 20th centuries. Volunteers perceive their ongoing work as a continuation of the Ukrainian struggle for sovereignty in 2014 and of efforts against cultural erasures in the Soviet Union and toward liberation from Moscow’s imperialism.
This awareness of one’s own positionality and what political predicaments shape it fosters the opportunity to recognize ways to act, to change, and to contribute through practices of communal support—to enact political care.
What Does It Mean To Care?
Although a wide array of support acts can be characterized as care, care is not neccesarily a сommittment to the ultimate good. Care labor produces inequalities and marginalizes. Care can be a premise for paternalistic control (neocolonial NGO development or liberal protection of the “rights” of the powerful). Political care practices and relationships are not free of frictions, juxtapositions, and complexities.
So what constitutes care? Theories of living in precariousness call for transnational solidarities and the awareness of our dependency on one another. Political care requires not only acknowledgment of interdependency but also responsibility toward one’s community and society. This is why political care extends beyond the binary between caregiver and care receiver. Those who are on the front lines protect the lives and futures of those in the rear. Civilian activists and volunteers, in turn, support soldiers and other civilians, establishing a reciprocal relationship of support and care between the front and rear. This is what allows political care to materialize—as a practice of the everyday and a tool for strategizing the nearest future.
“Who, if not me?” is an unspoken motto of Ukrainian female volunteers. They take responsibility for identifying and meeting the societal needs that the state fails to fulfil. Volunteers imagine responsibility neither as a duty (as in deontological ethics) nor as the neoliberal conception of individual autonomy. Instead, the need to exercise responsibility as part of the community is ultimately political and understood as a collective anti-colonial fight for freedom: to be part of the past fight (anti-imperial and anti-Soviet resistance), the present fight (full-scale war), and the future bettering of the hard-won land.
Both interdependency and responsibility begin with the intimate, local, and tangible. Thread by thread, knot by knot, they extend to national and global politics, economies, and relationships.
Somewhere Between Utopia and Practical Necessity
In an increasingly turbulent, polarized world, it is hard to count all hopeful and promising attempts to find just ways of coexistence: cosmopolitanism, decolonization of institutions, identity politics, sustainability, human rights, and multiculturalism. Care, as a fundamental political activity, is not a utopian attempt to imagine a more just world. Many communities have long been building their livelihood, guided by the acknowledgment of radical interdependency and responsibility. We see political care in action: in the work of Ukrainian volunteers and activists, in the tireless struggles of Belarusian and Siberian freedom fighters, in Mahsa Amini protests, in community kitchens in Gaza, in self-organizing, and in alternative governing in Rojava and Chiapas.
Political care is not merely an alternative strategy. It is a vital approach to engagement that reshapes how we think and interact with our surroundings. Care as a practice can—and must—be applied to political decision-making and guide political action. It should be researched, discussed, and practised as a strategy not only in feminist academic networks or alternative brave spaces.
We must concentrate our interdisciplinary efforts on political care to better understand how communities function and continue to thrive, even under the most dooming conditions and forecasts.
Anastasiia Omelianuk is PhD candidate in social and cultural anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She was a junior visiting fellow of the program Ukraine in European Dialogue in 2023–2024.
