Ukraine The young women holding a country together

Ukraine is increasingly a country held together by women.

- Charlotte Higgins

Those in their 30s - millennial women born into an independent Ukraine, raised in economic turbulence and thrust into adulthood on the wave of revolution and war - are shouldering huge burdens of responsibility. They are fundraising for the army, or sometimes serving in it. They are running civil society organisations, advocating for their country abroad and becoming activists.

At the same time, unlike their male counterparts who are forbidden from leaving the country and are eligible for conscription, they have choices - to join the army, or not; to stay in the country, or not. For some, the question of whether to have children, when the war shows no sign of abating, looms large. For many of them, exhaustion, stress and grief are constant companions. We spoke to six Ukrainian women aged between 29 and 40 about their lives.

Mariia Shuvalova, 32, is an academic publisher. But she also has a few other projects. After Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 she raised more than $40,000 (£30,000) - as much as she had paid for her own flat - to buy bulletproof vests, converting the money into cryptocurrency to pay a Chinese factory.

She volunteers for about five hours a week at a military unit, is converting her literature PhD into a book, writing a post-apocalyptic novel and using her fluent English to campaign for Ukraine - the kind of portfolio of paid and unpaid work that is not unusual among her purpose-driven generation.

"You have zero professional justification to do a bunch of these things, but you just do it because it's necessary," she says.

Shuvalova was born in 1993, two years after Ukraine achieved independence. Her cohort was swept to adulthood by revolution: when she was 20 the 2012 Maidan protests erupted in Kyiv, forcing the Russia-leaning president, Viktor Yanukovych, to flee the country.