“Not Yours – That's Why You're Seething”
In one sketch from the Mavka Diaries – anonymous, illustrated testimonies from women under Russian occupation, published through the underground network “Angry Mavka” – a masked woman holds up a scrap of paper reading, in Russian, Не твоя, вот и бесишься: not yours, that's why you're seething. Less a plea than a taunt, aimed at an occupier caught between what he controls and what he can actually have – her body, her home, her sense of humour. It is Angry Mavka in miniature: defiance with a smirk the occupying state has no doctrine for.
European Union 2026
The diaries began in 2023, a way for members – and other women who found them by word of mouth or via Telegram – to put occupation into words for an audience that would otherwise never see it. Entries are short, handwritten or sketched, deliberately anonymous, smuggled out; some have since travelled in the exhibition form abroad. By mid-2026, roughly one-fifth of Ukraine's territory, home to an estimated 3–3.5 million people across Crimea, most of Luhansk and Donetsk, and parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv and Sumy, remained occupied, folded through Russification, pressure on residents to take a Russian passport, and information control into Russian structures. The women describe that machinery from the inside: a portrait of the Russian president looming over a beach of debris, captioned with his own denial that anything is wrong; a schoolteacher equating Ukraine's 2013–14 uprising with fascism while vowing to “protect” Ukrainian culture. Between the jokes and the noise, the diaries record two things: what occupation does to people, and how they respond.
The Republic behind the Curtains
Ukrainian symbols disappear first from the street, then from the record – signs swapped, monuments removed, flags impossible to fly. "The occupiers don't understand our language, so they're frightened by the letters 'ї' and 'є' (letters that don’t exist in the Russian alphabet)", one Angry Mavka co-founder has said – even spelling becomes a form of sabotage. The symbolism migrated inward: a tattoo of the movement's sun-and-mountain emblem worn where a body search won't find it; embroidery on a tablecloth a soldier mistakes for decoration; a grandmother reciting the old name of her street from memory. It happens under watch – "the biggest challenge is the cameras", the women note, "on every pole, some with facial recognition now". One gesture is almost administrative: refusing to trade a Ukrainian passport for the occupation-issued one, even as banking and medical care are withheld from those who won't convert. The same logic holds for graves and recipes, kept alive as place names are overwritten. Sovereignty here hasn't vanished – it has moved indoors, into drawers, kitchens, memory.
A Curriculum of Refusal
The contest is sharpest over children. The diaries describe Ukrainian identity treated as a symptom to be corrected – a girl handed a “pill against Ukrainian-ness” by an armed adult, shorthand for an identity framed as a disorder. “Good behaviour” becomes loyalty to the occupier: children pushed toward occupational army structures and patriotic events, or away from anything too Ukrainian, family separation looming when correction fails. These rank among occupation's defining pressures: forced support for the occupying army, pathologising Ukrainian identity, separating children from family.
The Calendar That Won't Synchronise
Occupation installs its own calendar over the Ukrainian one – Victory Day preparations from early spring, pageants in Russian folk costume, a new portrait in the principal's office. Underneath runs a second, private one: Easter eggs painted by candlelight in Ukrainian colours, a twelve-dish Christmas meal shared across checkpoints and time zones, so eating together synchronises with a country rather than a place. As one entry puts it, more plainly than any manifesto: "because we are Ukraine; we just haven't been able to defend ourselves”. None of it looks like resistance from outside – a woman refusing to let occupation dictate the rhythm of her year. Each small ritual sits beneath the threshold of a spectacle; together they form a parallel civic calendar, and with it a claim to agency.
Laughing at the Man with the Rifle
Most resistance movements ask to be taken seriously. Angry Mavka asks to be found insufferable. Its founders have said as much: "We piss off the occupiers, give them a headache and don't let them forget that they are occupiers here" – humour that needles the men as much as it steadies the women, "we are not scared to laugh them out and it makes them nuts". Its first image to travel widely wasn't a manifesto but a joke about flowers: posted for the 8th of March, still marked with Soviet-style modest bouquets, showing a woman refusing exactly that, captioned "I don't want your flowers — I want my Ukraine back." Even FSB infiltration attempts get folded into the joke: "sometimes 'Comrade Major' looks ridiculous when he tries to pretend to be a girl", one founder has laughed.
It began almost as a joke among friends in a Melitopol kitchen – "the kind of jokes that surface in the hardest moments, when you laugh just to stop yourself from crying" – before becoming something the occupation must take seriously precisely because it won’t. Burning a Russian flag, one founder has admitted, is "probably the riskiest thing we've done. But the coolest". Military donations and self-printed “real news” newspapers give that joke a durable political afterlife.
A Signal in the Static
Campaigns run from inside occupation turn kitchens and back rooms into tiny editorial offices – "the first rule of the club is you don't talk about the club," members say, half joking. Singing in a kitchen or a car, windows up, needs no device – just a voice and a language kept in working order. None of this erases what occupation costs: families split by the front line, elderly residents left alone, medical care and property withheld. The humour and the grief are handled by the same women, often the same week.
More than 1,600 days into an occupation designed to erase the line between “occupied” and “assimilated”, the Mavka Diaries suggest the opposite: sovereignty didn't disappear, it moved indoors – into a passport kept in a drawer, a name spoken only at home, a song sung with the windows shut, a note that reads, simply, not yours, that's why you're seething. What survives here is not only identity but agency: the stubborn, everyday capacity to decide who you are, where you belong, and with whom.
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About the author: Dr Olha Mukha is a Ukrainian cultural analyst, philosopher, and curator working at the intersection of cultural diplomacy, human rights, and non-violent resistance research. She heads the IED at the Territory of Terror Memorial Museum in Lviv, co-founded the London-based think-tank Resilience & Reconstruction, and is a member of PEN Ukraine. She curated Unseen Force, a project documenting non-violent resistance in Ukraine's temporarily occupied territories; participant of IWM Vienna's Documenting Ukraine programme. She is a co-author of Stories from Ukraine: Believers, and has published more than 80 academic and cultural works.