There’s been a number of good feminist initiatives in Ukraine in recent years — whether it’s the internet media platform Gender in details, the Kyiv-based ReSew sewing cooperative, the Lviv organisation Feminist Workshop or the Kharkiv Week of Women’s Solidarity festival, to name a few. But despite this, Ukrainian feminism stays in the same place it began in the 2000s — online and, nowadays, mostly on Facebook. It’s hard for feminist discourse to step outside of Facebook and reach the public; it doesn’t have a solid existence in Ukrainian academia. In addition, there’s another problem, one that is common to most feminist movements: inconsistency and division over differing views on gender, the rights of LGBTQ people, sex workers and others.

So, for Ukrainian feminists, 8 March is particularly important because it’s one of the few opportunities for public action. But every year, the period leading up to International Women’s Day is when the country’s passive online feminist movement experiences its deepest crisis. All of Ukrainian feminism’s inner conflicts come to the surface when a public event addressing the fight for women’s rights is being planned.

How will it be this year? It seems that, in 2018, there are few controversies around 8 March. Instead, there are internal scandals.

This year, the march in Kyiv on International Women’s Day under the slogan “Tolerate no more” has, typically, no specific political goals, aside from ratifying the Istanbul Convention on gender-based violence.