KYIV and KHARKIV — Maryna Mytsiuk spends spare hours at a shooting range outside Kyiv, steadying her aim and focusing on targets as she waits for a call that could send her to the front any day.
“Of course, I’d like to be in a combat position,” said Mytsiuk, a 27-year-old folklore scholar who speaks Japanese and works for a nonprofit. “With my build and height, I’m not a natural fit for that … so I’m training very hard.”
She is one of an increasing number of Ukrainian women volunteering for military service as Russia’s full-scale invasion approaches its fourth year and manpower shortages persist. Mytsiuk says the armed forces have become far more open to women since 2022. Early in the invasion she recalled being told she belonged in the kitchen “where I could make dumplings.” She ignored that advice, earned a second degree at a military university this summer and applied to brigades with special forces units despite difficult conversations with her mother and her boyfriend, both of whom oppose her decision.
“I see women my age getting married, having children,” she said. “I can’t help having thoughts, like am I doing the right thing? But there’s no turning back now.” She believes that, with no ceasefire in sight, many Ukrainians able to fight will sooner or later have to.
Volunteers, not draftees
Ukrainian men ages 25 to 60 are subject to conscription; women are exempt. That distinction, Mytsiuk says, means she and others are serving by choice. The military reported more than 70,000 women in service as of January — roughly 8 percent of the armed forces — and the number of women in uniform has grown by about 40 percent since 2021. Oksana Hryhorieva, the military’s gender adviser, notes that a 2018 law began to dismantle a deeply patriarchal system that had legally barred women from many combat roles and from attending certain military university programs. After Russia’s 2014 incursions, women who fought were often listed on paper as cooks or medics even when they faced combat on the front lines.
Today women account for about 20 percent of military cadets and fill thousands of officially recognized combat jobs — fighter pilots, artillery commanders, drone operators and engineers among them. Several brigades, including Khartiia and Azov of the National Guard, now highlight women in recruitment. Khartiia, a volunteer battalion formed in early 2022 and based near Kharkiv, is well resourced and has become known for experimenting with robotic systems. This spring it launched a campaign centered on women soldiers, featuring recruits like Jess, a 21-year-old testing land drones used to deliver supplies to forward positions.
The drone operators
At a Khartiia camp, two pilot-operators examined freshly assembled first-person-view (FPV) drones in a workshop. For security reasons, reporters used only first names and call signs at the unit’s request.
Yevheniia, 19, who calls herself “Furia,” said male colleagues still sometimes ask, “What are you doing here?” She replies simply: “I have to be here, and that’s that.” Asked why she chose drones, she laughed: “I think because I love to play computer games.” She and Dasha are two of three women in an FPV unit of about 15.
Dasha, 23, who uses the call sign “Galactica,” had planned to become a police officer before the war. Her mother wept as she left for basic training. “My mother wanted me to stay at home, be a wife, have children,” Dasha said. “And I chose what she calls a man’s profession, living with a constant threat to my life.”
Another operator, Daria, a former software engineer in her early 30s, shifted from humanitarian work early in the invasion to assembling and flying FPV drones. She found a place in Khartiia where technical skills were prized. “Here,” she said, “they knew what to do with me.” Joining meant losing touch with many friends; some male acquaintances fled the country to avoid conscription. “It’s their choice,” she said. “They can do what they want. I can’t say everyone needs to be like me — though I want that, honestly.”
The medic
In Sumy, combat medic Olena Ivanenko, 44, known by the call sign “Ryzh,” took a rare pause from the front for a manicure. “I know that in three days my nails will be grimy again,” she said. “But looking at clean nails for one day gives me such relief and pleasure. For me, it’s as routine as breakfast.”
Ryzh ran restaurants before joining the military in 2023. She served with the 47th Mechanized Brigade before transferring to the 412 Nemesis brigade, which focuses on unmanned systems. “I decided after three months of service that I would stay in the army forever,” she said. “I will not return to civilian life. I feel very comfortable here. I feel like I am 100,000, million percent in my place.”
Her years at the front have included grave losses. She calls certain anniversaries “the dark dates” after battles when many in her unit died, including close friends. In one engagement a Russian tank struck and she was wounded in the leg; she has since recovered. Ryzh often speaks to civilians about the widening divide between those in uniform and those at home: “Soldiers say we are working for victory, and civilians say we want peace,” she said. “But peace and victory are different things.”
The intelligence analyst
At an exhibition in Kyiv, military intelligence unveiled sea drones and introduced three masked unit members who operate them. One, who used the call sign “Xena,” has been an analyst for a decade and joined the elite unit after the full-scale invasion, a period that dramatically accelerated weapons innovation in Ukraine. Ukrainian officials say a weaponized sea drone variant sank a Russian fighter jet in the Black Sea earlier this year.
“Our challenge is to lure the Russians out of their bases and then hunt them,” Xena said. “We intend to keep adapting these sea drones until we can target and hit Russian fighter jets, helicopters and ships under any conditions.” She said she is used to being the only woman on many teams and still encounters assumptions about women’s roles, but that the drive to win keeps her focused.
A death, and more who follow
In early September St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv was packed for the funeral of 19-year-old Daria Lopatina, an engineer with Azov’s special forces who had left the Kyiv School of Economics to defend her country. Pallbearers carried her coffin past mourners kneeling in respect. Ruslan Shelar, who works at the Defense Ministry with Lopatina’s father, said he has noticed a rise in young women enlisting, especially those under 25. “She grew up with war,” Shelar said of Lopatina, raised amid the conflict that followed Russia’s 2014 actions in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. “Her path was set.”
Ukraine’s armed forces do not publish sex-disaggregated casualty figures, so the number of female soldiers killed is unclear. The risks are part of what recruits like Mytsiuk consider as they wait for deployment. “I constantly think about it, about death,” she said. “But it’s better to die on the battlefield than from a missile hitting your apartment in Kyiv. Better to die fighting than die on your knees.”
Olena Lysenko and Hanna Palamarenko contributed reporting from Kyiv.