Russia’s full-scale invasion upended the life Mavka once knew. Determined to protect her home and family, she joined Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade, the Black Cossacks, despite repeated rejection, eventually helping maintain the communications networks linking soldiers and command structures near the front line.
In the dimmer back room of a café in central Kharkiv, a Hollywood film flickers silently across the wall behind her. The projected light moves over cups, tables, faces, then disappears again into shadow. Outside, the city continues through another spring under war – restaurants open, traffic moving, civilians hurrying along sidewalks that have learned to absorb the sound of sirens into everyday life.
Sharpened by war
Mavka sits calmly beneath the shifting light in a Ukrainian military uniform, her arms folded loosely across her chest. She laughs often during the conversation. Not nervously, nor in the forced way people sometimes laugh to escape difficult subjects, but openly and with surprising ease. Her dark hair falls over one shoulder, her uniform sits neatly, deliberately, and there is something striking about the contrast between the setting and the way she carries herself: composed, alert, entirely present. The war has not flattened her into abstraction or bitterness. If anything, it seems to have sharpened her sense of who she is.
Today, she serves with the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, the Black Cossacks, helping maintain the communications networks that link soldiers, positions and command structures across the battlefield. Some aspects of her current role remain sensitive, but the scale of responsibility is unmistakable. What once involved personally driving toward exposed positions to establish radio and internet connections has gradually become a role centered more on coordination, oversight and leadership at the battalion level.
“The enemy came to our land, to our homes,” she said. “Because of that, I am here.”
The instinct to care
Before the war, her life followed a very different rhythm.
Mavka grew up near Sumy, in northeastern Ukraine, not far from the Russian border. In civilian life, she worked as a photographer, though at first it had little to do with business or commercial assignments.
“Everyone sees the world differently,” she explained. “Photography was a way of showing others my perspective.”
Eventually, the artistic side of photography became harder to sustain financially. Like many in the field, she moved increasingly toward weddings, baptisms, school events, portraits of children and families. Some of her own projects still made their way into exhibitions abroad, though she barely had time to follow where exactly they ended up.
Long before Russia’s full-scale invasion began, the same qualities that shape her today were already visible in the way she approached the world around her: attentive to detail, protective of what seemed neglected, unwilling to simply walk past things that needed care.
Away from commissioned work, she devoted much of her time to environmental and animal welfare initiatives around her hometown. She photographed dogs and cats in shelters to help local organizations raise money and awareness. She cleaned forests and roadside areas herself, often quietly and without making a public gesture out of it.
“I didn’t photograph myself doing it,” she said with a slight shrug. “I didn’t involve media. I just did it for myself, for the soul.”
At one point, frustrated by garbage dumped near a young forest close to her home, she and her father used his tractor to clear the area themselves before confronting those responsible and demanding they organize proper cleanup measures. The way she speaks about it resembles neither activism nor self-praise. More like a deeply internal intolerance toward neglect.
“Like a bird or an animal protecting its child. It just knows it has to protect.”
When the Tanks Came
That impulse – to intervene instead of simply watching – runs through almost every part of her story.
“When Russian tanks entered my native village in the Sumy region and several houses were destroyed by artillery,” she recalled, “my vision of the world suddenly narrowed to one goal: My son had to be safe.” The sentence hangs in the dim café for a moment.
“It was instinct,” she continued. “To protect my child and my home by any available means.”
The way she describes those first months of the invasion contains neither theatrical patriotism nor dramatic declarations. “There wasn’t this thinking of ‘what if,’” she explains. “Like a bird or an animal protecting its child. It just knows it has to protect.”
Her voice remains measured while describing those days, but beneath the calmness is the memory of intense physical fear.
“There was fear. There was adrenaline,” Mavka recalled. “But at the same time, you think. You think what to do, how to do it, where to go, how to get out of the situation.”
Joining the military was not impulsive, she said. She had to think about her son, her parents, logistics, responsibility and survival. Everything had to be coordinated carefully.
“It wasn’t like I just said goodbye and went somewhere to die,” she continued. “I had to understand how to organize everything so nobody would suffer because of my decision.”
At the time, her son was 11 years old. Today, he is 15 and studies in western Ukraine, away from the front lines that reshaped his mother’s life.
“It’s hard to explain,” she said quietly. “It’s some kind of force inside you that moves you. You just have to do it.”
“To chew the earth with our teeth”
But her path into the army was far from straightforward. Her first attempts to enlist were repeatedly rejected. “They tried for a long time to talk me out of joining,” she recalled with a faint smile.
While waiting to be mobilized, she threw herself into volunteer work instead. She helped clear debris in settlements damaged during Russian occupation and shelling. She worked with volunteer organizations and the Red Cross. She made camouflage nets. She transported aid. She helped wherever she could.
Again, the pattern repeated itself: If something needed to be done, she moved toward it.
Then one day in 2023, the call finally came. “They asked: ‘Have you changed your mind?’” she said. “‘No,’ I said. Then they told me: ‘Tomorrow at three in the morning we leave.’ So I packed and went.”
During basic combat training, she prepared herself for the worst. “We learned to dig trenches, to shoot constantly,” she said. Then, laughing briefly at the memory, she added: “To chew the earth with our teeth.”
After two months, she was deployed with the Black Cossacks brigade to some of the most heavily contested areas of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
“I thought they would send me directly to the front line,” she said with a brief laugh. “I expected trenches, assaults, machine guns, constant direct contact with the enemy – everything we trained for.”
Instead, her initial role centered around communications: establishing and maintaining radio systems, repeaters and internet infrastructure between units and command structures.
In war, clear boundaries rarely exist.
Yet even there, danger never felt far away. The work, often only a short distance from Russian forces, placed her under constant threat from artillery and first-person view (FPV) drones.
The invisible nervous system
Over time, the work expanded far beyond technical responsibilities. “I took on everything,” she recalled. “I coordinated and installed communication systems, drove out to positions, evacuated guys and constantly adapted to whatever was needed.”
At one point, after a strike trapped fellow soldiers close to enemy positions, she helped retrieve them. It was not formally part of her primary assignment, but in war, clear boundaries rarely exist.
“Of course it’s scary,” she said. “Especially when something lands 50 meters away from you. Your pulse is pounding so hard you can barely function for a few minutes.”
“But there is a task,” she continued after a brief pause. “And it has to be done.” The sentence captures much of the way she speaks about war. Not as ideology, but almost as an operating principle.
What worried her even more than her own safety, however, was the possibility of losing others.
“When you travel with your comrades, you think about what you would do if someone gets wounded,” she said. “You save the medics’ phone numbers. You memorize evacuation points. You think how to get someone into the vehicle.”
In many ways, communication systems became the invisible nervous system through which she experienced the war. “Without the networks, it is like being without eyes, without ears,” she said.
Radio links connect soldiers to commanders, positions to battalions, battalions to each other. Internet infrastructure matters just as much now – streams, drones, coordination and real-time information. Entire sections of modern warfare depend on systems most civilians never see.
“At first, I had to prove every single day that I could do it.”
Over the years, the scope of Mavka’s work steadily widened. Eventually, she moved into a more senior role at the battalion level. Today, she no longer personally carries out every task she once did herself. Her work has shifted increasingly toward coordination, management and ensuring systems continue functioning at a larger scale.
“If you are a soldier, you have one kind of responsibility,” she said. “If you become an officer, it changes.”
No room for categories
The transformation, however, was anything but linear. As a woman inside the military, she recalled having to constantly demonstrate that she was capable – especially early on.
“At first, I had to prove every single day that I could do it,” she said.
During training, instructors nicknamed her “Rex” because of the intensity with which she approached exercises and tasks. Still, commanders remained skeptical. She recalled being genuinely confused by the assumptions around gender.
“They would tell me: ‘Go sit somewhere as a drone operator. Why do you need this at all?’”
Instead, she pushed herself into every aspect of the work. “I climbed everywhere,” she said with a grin. “I asked them to teach me every detail.” Eventually, attitudes began to shift.
At one point, she said groups of several men would be assigned to certain communications tasks with limited success. Then one company commander took her alone instead. “He realized I could do the work of all those people myself,” she said. From there, trust began to grow.
Her experience has taught her that war leaves little room for rigid ideas about gender, as such distinctions become secondary to survival, responsibility and the shared goal of resistance.
“It doesn’t matter whether you are a man or a woman. We are all inside this mechanism like parts of a clock,” she said. “Know your job and do it. Together we move toward one goal – peace on our land.”
One thing that becomes clear while speaking with Mavka is how little interest she has in reducing people, including herself, to simple categories. What she has lived through seems to have stripped away much of her patience for romanticized ideas about women, whether in combat or elsewhere.
“Because in this system, you cannot remain one hundred percent a woman. You become part of the mechanism of tasks.”
“A woman may carry more lightness,” she reflected at one point while walking through central Kharkiv after leaving the café. “But not every woman is light. It depends on the person.”
“You can only meet through empathy”
People move through the streets as cars roll steadily through the intersections. Somewhere in the distance, music drifts briefly from an open storefront before disappearing again beneath the sound of traffic.
Mavka went silent for a moment, attentively taking in the scene around her before continuing.
“Women become rougher in the military,” she said. “Because in this system, you cannot remain one hundred percent a woman. You become part of the mechanism of tasks.”
For soldiers returning from positions closer to the front, she said, reintegrating even temporarily into ordinary civilian space can feel disorienting.
“When I came home from there, sometimes for four days I could not understand what was happening,” she said. “Everything felt different.” For her, military and civilian life now feel like two separate realities.
Even when both sides genuinely try to understand one another, the gap often remains.
“You can only meet through empathy,” she noted. “But the lives themselves cannot truly be compared.”
There are still moments during service when her eye returns almost instinctively to photography – some composition, some light, some image unfolding in front of her. But the reaction is no longer the same.
“When you are there, your priorities change,” she explained. “You think about possible threats, FPVs, communications, positions.” As a soldier, observation can never remain detached. Every landscape carries tactical meaning.
Mavka
However, traces of her earlier self still remain visible, even in the call sign she chose: “Mavka.”
In Ukrainian mythology, a mavka is often associated with nature and forest spirits. During training, while others rested during breaks, she wandered through nearby wooded areas collecting garbage and cleaning the environment around the camp. Soldiers jokingly gave her different nicknames before “Mavka” finally stuck.
“In my case,” she said, “it was connected to protecting nature. Protecting forests.”
Mavka checked the time. There are still responsibilities waiting for her: meetings, tasks, people relying on decisions she now helps make inside the brigade.
The war did not turn her into someone else entirely. Much of what defines her now already existed long before the invasion – the instinct to act, to protect, to step in rather than stand aside.
What changed was the scale of responsibility surrounding it.