Twelve female rebel fighters from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine swapped military clothing for evening gowns on Saturday (March 7) to bring a splash of color to International Women’s Day.
The show participants – fighters from rebel “Vostok” and “Oplot” battalions arrived at the Donetsk Plaza hotel – the show’s venue – wearing camouflage uniforms. Make-up artists and hairdressers were already waiting for them in a dressing room. The event participants said the show was not just about fashion, but rather about proving that female fighters remain beautiful and feminine despite war dangers and hardships.
“This is just an event… an event to show that military women can also be beautiful and feminine,” said a rebel fighter from Donetsk Darya Voronina.
Another show participant, Irina Litvinova, said that though she has taken up arms, her real goal was peace: “We hope and we really want peace, so that our children are not being killed as well as our civilians who are not guilty of anything.”
Though the event was advertised as a fashion show no one announced dress designers, but rather which battalion a woman was fighting for.
“We took off uniforms, put on nice dresses came out and show off, also showed that such fragile girls can fight, use arms,” said a show participant Irina Lyushuban. Asked about peace prospects in Ukraine’s east she replied: “Yes, of course peace will come, and it will be ours, and the victory will be ours.”
Though majority of the show spectators were civilians, there were many armed rebels in the hall.
An uneasy ceasefire holds in eastern Ukraine, though both sides regularly accuse each other of continued violence – a sign of the fragility of the peace accord agreed in Minsk last month, which calls for the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front-line.
Some 6,000 people have been killed in fighting since separatists took up arms last year in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland in response to the overthrow of the Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovich in Kiev.
(Reuters)