Iryna Tsybukh posthumously received the Ukrainian Women's Congress award for leadership

Iryna Tsybukh/instagram

Ukrainian Women's Congress (UWC) posthumously awarded Iryna Tsybukh, a combat medic of the “Hospitaliers” battalion, for outstanding achievements in the development of gender equality and women's leadership.

The award during The 8th Ukrainian Women's Congress was hosted by the mother of a military servicewoman, Oksana Tsybukh.

She cited her daughter's thoughts on Ukrainian education, memory and honoring fallen heroes, as well as what the future of the state should be.

Irynka was supposed to be here with you today. She was competent in many areas, but her life, like thousands of others, was taken by Russia. As Irynka said, sadness for the people we lost imposes responsibility on us. It is the responsibility of the living to the dead to bear witness to what happened and the evil we faced. A very difficult task for you and me is to work for ourselves and for them, she said.

In 2015, Iryna began going to the front as a paramedic, and with the start of a full-scale war, this work became permanent for her.

Strength, patriotism, upbringing, beauty are the true standards of a modern Ukrainian woman. Our nominee is a person with whom you are ready to go into the toughest battle. It is a beauty full of values. At the age of 25, she had a very long life ahead of her, but instead she chose an incredibly difficult, but truly worthy path – the path of a hospitalist, the path of defenders, – noted the co-founder of UZHK, People's Deputy Maria Ionova.

The award of the UZHK is named after Mary O'Hagen, who worked in Ukraine for 5 years after the Revolution of Dignity, headed the Ukrainian office of the National Democratic Institute (NDI). Last year, doctor and volunteer Natalya Lelyukh became the winner of the award.

Let us remind you that the 25-year-old project manager of the regional Public Broadcasting and combat medic Iryna Tsybukh died during a rotation in the Kharkiv direction on May 29. She was supposed to turn 26 on June 1.

Since 2015, Iryna has been traveling to Donbas as a military paramedic, was a combat medic in the volunteer battalion “Hospitaliers”, which is engaged in the medical evacuation of soldiers in hot spots on the front line. In February 2022, she joined the volunteer battalion and took the position of senior crew.