“I thought I would never want to kill anyone.” Combat medic Hanna Vasyk on the mobilization of women and PTSD
“I said: ‘Imagine that a f*cking missile is already flying into this palazzo and you have the last five seconds left.’ And I counted down. They say it worked,” Hanna Vasyk recalls her conversation with foreign artists at the Venice Biennale.
She got a master's degree in political science, a PhD in philosophy, was an art manager, and now she is a combat medic and junior sergeant of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
In a conversation with Serhii Hnezdilov, a soldier and host of hromadske, Hanna told how she got into the army and what scared her the most. She also talked about whether she supports the mobilization of women and how she overcomes PTSD.
How Hanna Vasyk got into the army
On the first day of the war, I was in Uganda, on the border with Rwanda. It was the end of my second month in Africa, and I was rebooting between projects.
I was on an island in the middle of a lake high in the mountains and woke up at 5 am to go gorilla trekking. Before that, I had a digital detox and meditated all day. And then I went on the Internet and saw that there would be no gorilla tracking and that I had to change my plans. There was no boat to go somewhere else, so I sat on the island all day and cried. At that time, I didn't smoke, I had quit, but some African man had a pack of cigarettes and I smoked them all.
I went to Berlin. I really wanted to go straight back to Ukraine and bought a Flixbus ticket to Lviv, but it was canceled, and I was stuck in Berlin. I thought it would be better to be safe and do charity work. My former colleagues from the Pinchuk Foundation and I had founded a large foundation and thought it would be better for the state, that I could use my civilian management skills and help.
I try not to regret this decision, but I felt really bad there, very uncomfortable. It ended in clinical depression, which I fortunately cured. At the end of the fall of 2022, I returned to Ukraine.
At the time, there were a lot of threats in the media about a second attack on Kyiv, about escalation. And I thought I needed to get ready. I went to some tactical medicine courses, other courses, bought a rifle, and learned to shoot. And I always laugh that before I knew it I was saving wounded storm troopers from Verbove as part of an airborne assault regiment.
It was very scary to make this decision, primarily because of the loss of freedom. This is a significant drawback of the army system as a whole: it is very easy to get in, but it is a challenge to get out. But the fear of losing Ukraine, the fear of losing the state, is much greater than the fear of the imperfection of the system. And because of this, you get in and think: I'll figure it out on the way, it's not the right time.
Mobilization of women
Mobilization is a forced mobilization, when a person has to go to the army. I believe that we have not yet utilized the potential of women in the recruitment process. For a very long time, society has had a marginalized image of a woman in the military: she is some kind of crazy woman who left her family, abandoned her children, and went to war. And she is condemned by society, her family, and her girlfriends.
Believe me, I've heard enough: “go cook borscht”, “you haven't given birth to any children”, “where are you going”, “you have more important functions and a mission on this earth”. So I think that first of all we have to change these things. I think the most important task now is to make women understand that they can join the Ukrainian Defense Forces. That they are ready to be welcomed, that no one will harass or humiliate them, that they will be trained and that they can perform their military work on an equal footing with men, and in some matters, perhaps even better. And when this resource is exhausted and we can make sure that all the women who wanted to join have joined voluntarily, and this is balanced with the processes of mobilizing men of military age, and there are still not enough people, I think that then we can talk about mobilizing women.
Our women are very cool. It's just that in a patriarchal society, many things and certain processes have developed the way they have. And it is important to understand, and for women in particular, that the future of Ukraine is now determined by those people who are involved in the fighting, those people who are now driving the enemy out of here. And this is a window of opportunity to equalize rights. But to equalize rights, we need to equalize responsibilities.
Born for war
I believe that we were all born for war, because we were born in this time and place. Every citizen of Ukraine is obliged to accept this battle, to accept this challenge and to help Ukraine survive now in one way or another. This is the minimum task.
Of course, we all planned other lives for ourselves. And I didn't plan to be a soldier at all. When I was studying political science at the university, I had the opportunity to go to the military department. But I was a hippie at the time, living in Indian ashrams and thinking that I would never want to kill anyone. But times have changed, and no one needs my hippie swimsuit anymore. They need a rifle, and I need to meet the challenges of the times.
The thing is that we, people, not only military but also civilians, are very afraid of uncertainty. We try very hard to plan something, to predict it, and this gives us the illusion of control over our lives. And when something goes wrong, we get hysterical and say that everything has fallen apart. But this is an infantile childish position. The world doesn't always ask you what you planned. There is a certain maturity and responsibility in this — to reorient and re-plan.
Importance of cultural diplomacy
I spoke at the opening of the PinchukArtCentre pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This year there was an exhibition of works by Ukrainian and international artists.
Before that, I was at the Munich Security Conference, where we, as a delegation of military personnel and veterans, spent days talking to foreign officials and, to put it very simply, asking for weapons through our personal stories. Obviously, you can't ask for weapons directly at the Biennale, because these people don't make such decisions. But with their voices they create pressure, they can create a demand for certain pro-Ukrainian decisions.
The exhibition was called “Do You Dare to Dream?”. And I said that they are so confident in their security that they have tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and we in Ukraine are not sure that tomorrow will come, we are not sure that we will even be alive today. And I made a countdown. I said: “Imagine that the f*cking missile is already flying into this palazzo and you have the last five seconds left.” And I counted “5, 4, 3, 2, 1”. They say it worked, that it was a more powerful speech than the president's last time. I don't know. I want to believe it did.
Here, the result will not be obvious and quick, but I believe that we should use all the opportunities. If it works for at least someone, it's great. For example, after my speech, a curator came up to me and said: “Anna, you know, for me the Ukrainian war was something very abstract when I saw it on the news. Now, whenever I hear about the war in Ukraine, I will imagine your face. Your story will remind me that there are real people with their own pains and problems behind the news.”
But the sad news is that, for example, at the main project at the Arsenal in Venice and in the Giardini Gardens, Ukraine was not mentioned. They have Syria, colonialism, Africa. I think it's partly fear. They're afraid of Russia, they're afraid of nuclear war, they're afraid of World War III, so they're not talking about it. But, again, artists used to talk about what people are afraid of, and here even the artists don't talk. And so it's either fear or the same mistake that Ukrainians made two years ago — the belief that everything will be great, that it will never happen, that it's somewhere very far away and they won't dare to do it. And they probably think it will never happen to them either.
Why it is important to talk about PTSD
After returning from the sector, I was diagnosed with quite a high level of PTSD and mild depression. I was working with a military psychologist, without medication, because they said that this level could be solved with the help of psychiatry and sessions with a psychologist.
I think it is very important to talk about this. In our society, this is a bit of a stigmatized issue, as if admitting to psychological problems is admitting to your weakness. For example, I am considered a strong person. And I think that PTSD is not only for the military. Many civilians also have it, including civilians who are abroad. Because trauma can be very different. It can be a rape, or you are a child and a car runs over a cat in front of you.
It is difficult for military personnel, such “rexes” and “tigers”, to admit that they have problems. But if we talk about it, normalize it, and put it on a par with other diseases, then we can work with it. It is treatable.
