Highlighting Ukrainian Women

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, Ukraine is fighting valiantly to regain its freedom, but today I wish to highlight the sheroes of Ukraine, its women.

These Ukrainian women work hard in the fields and farmsteads to feed their families, neighbors, and nation during war and during peace. These women labor day after day in the hot sun. By hand--you should see their hands--they plant precious seeds they carefully saved from last year using worn, simple implements, and small handheld shovels.

They harvest with scythes and use simple pushcarts to pull their harvest by hand back to their small villages. Underequipped, they toil year after year as best they can against the forces of nature of the season of the hardscrabble circumstances of their dear lives.

Along Ukraine's eastern front where Russia has brutally invaded and is systematically destroying villagers and villages, these courageous women are planting. They are planting between land mines. Who can even fathom their heroism?

They feed their children, their families, their neighbors, their countrymen and -women. Let us celebrate these inspirational women of Ukraine, women of hope. Their extraordinary sheroism is perseverance. Their grace under pressure is defined by what U.S. President John F. Kennedy called ``pure raw courage.''

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