In November 2025, I spend 21 hours in a train that took me from Budapest in Hungary to Kyiv in Ukraine. By this time, I had conducted several interviews with Ukrainian women’s organisations’ leaders and staff, whose experiences of policy influence I sought to examine through qualitative research. To me, it had felt like a journey to Kyiv was a necessity. How could I write and speak about the work of Ukrainian women without ever having been to Ukraine or having sat in the same room with them? To ground my reflection on methodological challenges which ensued, I will begin by discussing what constitutes feminist research and the possibility, and limitations, of ethics of care in war-time research (Ackerly et al. 2006; Brannelly and Barnes 2022; Dean 2024). The experience with multiple research trips to Ukraine in 2025 and 2026 has highlighted diverse methodological and ethical challenges: firstly, I grappled with the physical discomfort of going to and being in a warzone. Lack of sleep and sounds of explosions, generators buzzing across the city while people did not have access to heating, electricity and water. Do I need to be here? Second, I grappled with requesting time and energy from people who were and are mentally and physically exhausted. Do they have to talk to me? Third, I grappled with the capital-city and English-speaker biases induced by the combination of conflict and my own capacities, which I then sought to counter in Lviv. Who gets to speak in my research? Finally, and not least, I have been grappling with my interlocutor’s commitment to wartime solidarity with the Ukrainian state, and my own solidarity with the interlocutors. In the dust and flames of air-raids, can any of us see clearly?
