Last week Oleksii Kyrychenko took this incredible photo of his 9-year-old daughter and posted it on his Facebook account under the caption 'Girl with a candy'. Soon after it went viral, Donald Tusk, former Prime Minister of Poland and former President of the European Council did not hesitate to share it on his Twitter account.
The power of the picture is undeniable. One sees a girl with a shotgun and her lollipop in her mouth, sitting at the foot of a window protecting her country, of which there is less and less left. The walls of the wall, severely punished by shell holes and other shrapnel impacts, trigger our deep-rooted protective instincts, silently eliciting from us the classic grandmotherly warning we have all heard: "Get down from there, you'll hurt yourself! The child, however, is not invited to climb up by her recklessness or her rebelliousness. Another instinct, more guttural and less acquired considering her young age, does. The one that, responding to our protectionist thoughts, answers us: "I climb up even if it hurts me, because by getting off I allow others to continue doing it to me". The motto of every woman today.
One is quick to imagine her using her parents' tablet to play at combing princesses' hair or watching Yotube videos before the invasion began. Before the Russian occupation mortared away the flimsy normality in which she lived. The stability that, with images like this one, we reflect on from our sofa at home with the cooker nearby and our children fighting over a doll in the living room.
You don't have to be a parent to "remember" her even if you didn't know her personally: going to school every morning, playing at recess with her friends, going to birthday parties with cakes and soft drinks. We have the capacity to remember children we never knew because they all connect us to the one we once were. There is no more reliable and honest bridge in the universe than the company of one of them to return to our childhood.
That tablet I used to play with must have been weeks without a plug to charge it; now it is more important to have ammunition and to keep the rifle loaded; the multi-storey cakes have been replaced by tinned food looted from destroyed supermarkets; the running water that used to allow you to take hot, regular showers is now a luxury you didn't think about when a month ago, at the open tap, you dropped litres after hearing your mother remind you: "Brush your teeth and go to bed!
I look at Oleksii Kyrychenko's daughter and I can't help wondering whether this world would be the same if it were dominated by women: Prime Chancellors, Prime Ministers, Presidents of whole nations... To try to answer the question I turn to the newspaper archive and am surprised by history's answer, for I find that from Elizabeth I of England to Elizabeth I of Castile, most of the most memorable rulers in Europe over the last 500 years have been women.
The famous Russian empress, Catherine II (the Great), usurped the throne from her husband, Peter III, and led brutal wars with the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire throughout her reign. She harshly suppressed some peasant revolts and crushed Poland, which was eventually partitioned. Elizabeth of Russia, on the other hand, usurped the throne in a military coup from the young Tsar Ivan VI (who was only a year old) and sent her country into two major European wars: the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War. Isabella (The She-Wolf) of France, Queen of England, dethroned and executed her own husband, King Edward II, in close collaboration with her lover. Catherine de Medici is considered one of the main organisers of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre; she was also one of the inspirers of the Wars of Religion in France. Isabella I of Castile was the driving force behind Spain's rise as the world's first superpower in 1476, leading the country to dominate Europe for more than a century.
We can add Mary I of England, (the Bloody Mary), who persecuted English Protestants and condemned 273 people to the stake during her reinstatement of Catholicism. Or Boudicca, the Celtic queen of the Iceni tribe of present-day East Anglia, who led a revolt against Rome in 60/61 CE, as well as countless other women who, along with all these, were up to 27% more likely to participate in warfare than men in their time. Whether it was because they decided to enter into conflict for the sake of it, or to defend themselves against attacks by other kings or empires.
Perhaps the times of old Europe and its female barbarism are now a thing of the past. The truth is that there are few if any examples of women in the 20th century who have been as vile in command of an army as Adolf Hitler was or Vladimir Putin is being. This is what I meant when I started the comparison. Perhaps a world dominated by women like Oleksii's daughter, with her rifle in her arms and her lollipop in her mouth, is a safer place. A place where men's egos are relegated to the background and where invading a country is not just a delusion of grandeur.
In every story there is a message and an ending. And this one may be not only sufficient, but also disheartening. When asked about the details of the photo, the girl's father came clean: "The rifle was mine and it was unloaded. I gave it to her so that I could take the photo and draw the world's attention to Russia's aggression against Ukraine".
A picture is worth a thousand words.