Since the Maidan protests in 2014, Yarina Chagovets, once trained for the stage, has been part of a network inside a military hospital in Kharkiv that keeps things running where the system falls short.
Following the full-scale invasion in 2022, she has been organizing, feeding, and caring for those arriving from the front with a team that is now almost entirely female. What began as a response to a moment of crisis has grown into Sister of Mercy, an organization whose support now extends far beyond the hospital, reaching all the way to the units holding the line.
It is one of the first mild days of spring in Kharkiv, the kind of day that feels almost misplaced against everything that has happened here. The light is soft, the air no longer cuts, and in front of the military hospital, a narrow strip of green has begun to return. A small park stretches out with a few worn benches facing the entrance and a row of fir trees that look as if they have outlived several realities already. The building itself is a grey slab of concrete, heavy and unadorned, with barbed wire running along the perimeter, a quiet reminder that this is not just a place of treatment, but part of a war.
Between arrival and departure
Men arrive slowly, some on crutches, others in wheelchairs pushed along narrow paths that cut through the grass. Ambulances come and go in a steady rhythm. Some of the soldiers wear camouflage, others have already changed into civilian clothes. It is hard to tell who has just arrived and who is about to leave again.
Someone sits in the sun with a paper cup of coffee. At the edge of the courtyard, a small window is open. Bread rolls and hot drinks are handed out one by one. There is laughter somewhere nearby.
Inside, just behind that window, the place functions like a quiet counterpoint to the hospital’s clinical flow.
“This is the heart of the hospital,” Yarina says, almost matter-of-factly.
She moves through the narrow space with quick, precise gestures, always aware of what is missing, what needs to be handed over next. Two women open packages, sort clothing, set water to boil. When Yarina speaks, her voice carries easily, her features sharp, animated, almost theatrical at times – which is not surprising, given where she comes from. Before the war, she worked as a director, spent years on stage, performing, hosting, traveling between cities, living in a world defined by presence and expression.
That background has not disappeared. It has simply shifted location.
It shows in the way she builds a sentence, in the timing of a pause, in how quickly she moves from humor to gravity and back again. In one moment, she leans forward, speaking rapidly, emphatically; in the next, her voice drops, slows, becomes almost quiet. Her face carries both: fatigue, clearly visible in her eyes, and a steady determination that feels long settled. Her nails are carefully done – pink, glimmering, with white tips – a small detail that stands out in a place where almost everything else is reduced to function.
When she smiles, dimples appear at the edges of her eyes.
Where everything began
Yarina’s path into the hospital begins long before the full-scale invasion, in a different moment of rupture.
In the winter of 2013–2014, as the Maidan protests against the government of Viktor Yanukovych, widely seen as a Kremlin puppet, spread across the country, Ukraine was already in motion. What began as demonstrations quickly escalated into something else: violence, repression, shootings, the first wounded brought in from the streets. Kyiv became the epicenter, but cities like Kharkiv were not untouched. The sense that institutions were unprepared or unwilling to respond spread quickly.
It was in that moment that Yarina received a call. “Someone phoned me,” she recalls. “They said: we know that you are helping the wounded from Maidan. Now you need to come to the hospital.”
Her reaction was immediate. “Why me?” she remembers asking. “I’m not a medic, I’m a director by profession. Why should I go to the hospital?”
The answer she received did not address her hesitation. It simply overrode it. “Because you can do it. You can carry it.” So she agreed to try.
“I came to the hospital for the first time on May 2, 2014,” she says. “And from that day, everything took course.”
What followed was not a formal decision to change her life, but something more gradual and more binding: she stayed, and then stayed again, and eventually built something that made leaving no longer an option. Together with her mother, who would take over the financial, legal, and administrative side of what was still an informal structure, she created what would later become known as Sister of Mercy, an organization that hasn’t replaced the system but is holding together the parts that cannot function on their own.
February 24
When the full-scale invasion began in 2022, it was already in place – tested, adapted, quietly embedded in the daily life of the hospital.
On the morning of Feb. 24, they gathered again. “The men told us: ‘you all leave now,’” Yarina recalls, her voice tightening slightly as she reconstructs the moment. “We will take you to the cars. You go. We go to the front.”
What followed, she makes clear, left no room for doubt. “We said: no. You go to your units – and we stay here. That is not up for discussion.”
It was a collective decision. Not framed as bravery, not even as sacrifice, but as something closer to inevitability. Since then, most of the men connected to them have gone to fight.
The first months pushed the boundaries of what the volunteers had been doing. “We had to do everything,” she says, her tone flattening. “Carry the wounded. Bandage them. Cut their clothes. Wash things. Identify documents. Write everything down.”
At first, she admits, it was hard to look at the blood. “The torn-off legs. The torn-off arms.” She pauses briefly. “And when children were brought in… that was just impossible.”
There is no elaboration beyond that. The statement stands on its own.
A team of women
The war has reached deep into her own family. Her brother was killed earlier in the war. His son is now at the front, as is her brother-in-law and her husband.
He serves in a unit that operates mostly at night, working as an engineer and deminer; their days are structured around brief calls, one in the early morning when the unit returns, another before they leave again.
“He tells me: we are all back, we are all alive.” It is a rhythm built on uncertainty. She remains in close contact with his entire unit, a group she has known for years, many of them since Maidan 2014, a network that has long since grown into something more than a circle of acquaintances.
“Our team is now, unfortunately, almost entirely female. Only one man is with us,” she notes, and for a moment her expression shifts – something between amusement and quiet admiration. He is seventy-three years old and has repeatedly tried to enlist.
“They don’t take him,” she says. “Not even as a driver.” So he stayed. Like the others.
“They call us moms”
The hospital itself is a transit point – a place of stabilization rather than long-term care. Wounded soldiers arrive, are assessed, treated in the first critical phase, and then moved on to other facilities. The flow is constant, and it leaves gaps. Technically, many of them are not yet admitted. They exist in between – no longer at the front, not yet inside a system that fully accounts for them.
“They come here after three or four days without food,” she explains. “They arrive from places where it is very difficult to get out. Sometimes they have nothing with them.”
This is where Yarina and the other women step in.
They cook. They bring in hot meals – borshch, pampushky, whatever can be prepared and transported. They distribute clothing, because uniforms arrive torn, burned, soaked, or simply gone. They provide underwear, towels, hygiene items – things that would seem minor in another context, yet are the difference between being processed and being cared for.
“They call us mums,” she says at one point, and this time she lets the word linger. For a moment, these women replace the missing infrastructure of home. The care they provide is unmistakably maternal, even for grown men. “They want to see a woman strong, composed,” she explains. “Even now.” Not broken by the war, not neglected, but embodying something worth returning to, a continuity they can rely on.
Filling the gaps
The space they have built is not an addition to the hospital, but not outside necessity. It fills what the system cannot cover – not because it is broken, but because war expands need faster than any system can adapt.
“We are trying to create a rear for them,” she adds. “So they have what to eat, what to wear, what they need – and what to fight for.” That “rear” does not end at the hospital gates. Over the years, Sister of Mercy has kept medical institutions across the region running through maintenance and repairs, as well as providing equipment and medication where they are lacking.
At the same time, their support reaches units at the front, especially the one her husband serves in. They send what is needed: basic supplies like food, dry mixes, along with electric kettles, small stoves, generators, and vehicles.
The distinction between those being treated and those still fighting has long since blurred.
Their work is driven by demand. It shifts constantly, focusing on whatever gaps appear, wherever they appear.
Ice cream
“There is no typical day,” she says. From their small volunteer hub, Yarina moves between the wards, finding what is missing, organizing transport, tracking where patients are sent.
“The best moment,” and now there is something like a lightness in her voice, “is to go to admissions in the morning, where there are many new arrivals, and ask: ‘Boys, are you hungry?’”
She lets the question hang for a second, then continues. “And then to bring them ice cream.” It has become something that circulates among the wounded. “There are already legends,” she adds. “That this hospital is the only one where there is always ice cream.”
For Yarina, these small consistencies matter. “We are not tired,” she emphasizes, using a phrase she coined years ago, leaving it in Ukrainian, as if it belongs there.
Something that carries warmth
She gestures toward a large box in the corner, filled to the top with soft toys. They arrive in packages from abroad, sent by children, by families, by people who want to send something that carries warmth.
“One of our features,” she points out, almost amused, “after the ice cream – we always have soft toys.” Some soldiers attach them to their backpacks. Others keep them beside their beds.
She tells the story of a young soldier, nineteen, who had lost one arm and most of the other. His call sign was Monkey. “We gave him a soft toy,” her hands unconsciously mimicking the motion of holding something small. “A monkey.”
He held it with what remained of his hand, pressing it tightly against himself as he was being transferred.
“He said: ‘this monkey will always stay with me. And I will always remember you girls.’”
The presence of death
Even now, after all these years, she has not found a way to cope with the constant presence of death.
“I don’t know,” she says, almost quietly now. “I really don’t know how to deal with it.”
Before 2022, she explains, the Alley of Glory at Kharkiv’s cemetery had only a few rows. Even then, nine of those graves belonged to people she knew personally.
Now, she does not try to count. “There are just… so many.”
She lets the thought trail off, as if the number itself no longer holds. “There is no single answer,” she says. “Everyone goes through it in their own way.”
Early in the war, she recalls, soldiers guarding the hospital told them what they needed most was not reassurance in words, but something simpler: to see the women who stayed still present. Not withdrawn. Not broken by what surrounded them.
Holding the system together
If grief is one constant, money is another. The work has been sustained by a wider network – volunteers, local businesses, and supporters far beyond Kharkiv, across Ukraine and abroad.
“Getting money has become one of the hardest parts,” she says.
The needs have been growing steadily. Equipment breaks, medicine runs out, new requests arrive daily. The structure they have built over the years has had to evolve to keep up. At the same time, public donations have slowed. “People are exhausted,” she notes. The willingness to give can no longer keep pace with what is required.
A single picture
About those outside Ukraine and their perception of the war, she is blunt: “For them it is far away. They don’t understand what is happening here.”
Her voice sharpens. “They don’t think that we are holding this European border so that this monster does not come to them.”
If she had to reduce everything to a single picture, it wouldn’t be something symbolic or abstract. “It would be very bloody,” she says. “Explosions. Wounded children. Destroyed churches, museums, palaces.”
For her, there is no point in softening it. “And next to that – a fragile girl dragging a wounded soldier.” Her own sense of the future is not abstract.
The heart keeps moving
“My motivation is victory,” she states. “We are on our land. We are right. We are defending what is ours.” She describes what that victory might look like – not in terms of declarations or ceremonies, but in something more tangible.
“A huge concert on Freedom Square,” she says, her eyes lighting up. “Three weeks long.” Musicians who fought at the front returning to the stage. “Of course I will organize it. Of course I will host it.” After that, reconstruction.
Her sister, an architect, is already working on it, focusing on documenting destruction, collecting materials, and preparing the restoration of cultural heritage. “If everyone starts doing their part now,” Yarina says, “we will rebuild very quickly.”
The siren begins to wail in the background. In Kharkiv, as always, no one reacts. Outside the hospital, soldiers drift back and forth, stopping for a cigarette.
Yarina turns away, a brief, genuine smile crossing her face, and steps back into the narrow room behind the window. Within seconds, she slips back into the rhythm of work – handing over bread rolls, answering questions, coordinating with her colleagues.
Outside, the benches remain in the sun. A man on crutches sits down carefully, holding a cup of coffee. Inside, the heart of the hospital keeps moving.
“We are not tired,” she had said earlier. Not as a slogan. As a condition for everything else to continue.