Marina once imagined a very different future for herself. After years spent studying and working toward a medical career in Poland, she expected her life to remain abroad.
Instead, the war pulled her back to Ukraine.
Today, under the call sign “Bandana,” the 29-year-old evacuation medic serves with the Black Cossacks near eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv, helping wounded soldiers survive in a war increasingly shaped by drones, distance and constant uncertainty.
In the east of Kharkiv, once the city limits fall behind and the ring road circling the outskirts is crossed, the transition comes almost without warning.
One moment, traffic still moves through the city as usual. Then concrete blocks begin appearing along the route, followed by military checkpoints, coils of barbed wire and anti-drone nets stretching across roads leading toward the front. Here and there, new wooden poles are being driven into the ground, waiting for additional sections of netting to be attached. The wind is strong that day, sweeping across the dry spring landscape while distant detonations echo somewhere beyond the horizon.
Into the gray zone
It is the beginning of April in the Kharkiv region. The sky is almost cloudless – precisely the kind of weather soldiers nowadays immediately associate with danger. Good visibility means favorable conditions for drones on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides.
Eventually, a black van leaves the asphalt behind, continuing over rough agricultural tracks that cut across the open fields. With every additional mile, it becomes more apparent how quickly the edges of Kharkiv blend into what is known here as the “gray zone” – the unstable space between safer rear areas and the front itself, where assault drones, artillery and sudden strikes remain a constant threat.
After another 15 minutes, a small improvised position comes into view: a handful of soldiers gathered on a slope overlooking the surrounding terrain, beside a makeshift garage assembled from scrap materials and weathered tarps.
Bandana
A woman in camouflage walks over, an olive-green patterned cloth tied around her forehead. She introduces herself simply as Marina. Her call sign, not difficult to understand at first glance, is “Bandana.”
As evacuation routes grow longer and more dangerous, troops increasingly need to keep themselves alive long enough to reach people like Bandana.
Calm, focused and noticeably younger than some of her comrades, she smiles briefly before climbing into the van, where she begins telling her story away from the relentless wind.
The 29-year-old from Kyiv serves as an evacuation medic with the Black Cossacks. Her work begins where the first stage of battlefield medicine ends.
Combat medics positioned closer to the line provide immediate aid: tourniquets, airway management and emergency stabilization under fire. After that, wounded soldiers are brought further back to Marina and her team. There, inside vehicles or makeshift medical points, they receive more advanced treatment before being transferred to hospitals farther behind the line.
The geography of survival
But even that process has changed dramatically over the course of the war.
“Everything now depends on logistics,” Marina explains. “Two years ago, medics could sometimes get within 2 or 3 kilometers of positions. Now it can be 10, 20 kilometers away.”
Drones have reshaped not only combat itself, but also the geography of survival behind it. Roads are constantly monitored from above. Vehicles moving too close to the front can quickly become targets. As evacuation routes grow longer and more dangerous, troops increasingly need to keep themselves alive long enough to reach people like Bandana.
That is why a large part of her work now consists not only of treating the wounded, but teaching other soldiers how to survive until help arrives.
“We spend a lot of time training personnel,” she says. “Everyone has to know how to provide first aid, whether they are medics or not. There is not always an opportunity to quickly help a person.”
Much of the area where Marina and her unit operate is defined by relatively static front lines, even if periods of calm can quickly give way to renewed assaults.
“There is no structure in war,” she remarks quietly. “It depends on weather, roads, the season, whether there are leaves on the trees. Sometimes it’s calmer. Then suddenly assaults begin again.”
The loss of choice
She pauses for a moment before adding what she considers the hardest part of frontline life – and it is not what many civilians might expect: “You no longer belong to yourself here,” she says. “You don’t know when you’ll be needed. You don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or even in a few hours. There are no normal weekends. Even if you get time off, it’s random.”
Around her, the van rattles slightly in the wind outside.
“That,” she continues, “hits you mentally more than the danger itself.” Bandana believes this loss of personal autonomy is something even supportive civilians often fail to fully understand.
“People still have work, weekends, family routines,” she explains. “Even volunteers or people helping the army cannot completely understand this feeling. They still have a choice.”
Pulled back to Ukraine
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Marina imagined a very different future for herself.
For roughly five years, she had lived outside Ukraine, mostly in Poland. She studied medicine there and spent years working toward official recognition that would allow her to practice professionally as a nurse. Alongside that, she also studied cosmetology. By February 2022, as Russian troops began pouring into Ukraine, the long bureaucratic process was finally nearing completion.
“I already had the documents in my hands,” she recalls. At the time, she had returned to Ukraine only temporarily to visit her parents. But as the war escalated dramatically, she increasingly felt herself being pulled back toward Ukraine.
“Before the war, I thought my future would be abroad,” Marina says. “I didn’t think I would end up living in Ukraine again.”
Yet her understanding of home gradually began to take on a different meaning. “When everything is fine, you rarely go visit your parents,” she says. “But when they are sick, you immediately want to come back.”
“I understood my parents needed me. But I also understood I needed to be here.”
For her, Ukraine had become exactly that. So by autumn 2022, she had chosen to start over back home, though the idea of joining the army evolved much more slowly.
“It was not spontaneous,” she explains. “It was my moral and personal decision, but it lasted a long time.”
Yet the step toward military service also carried a personal weight. Marina is an only child, and with her father’s health already fragile, her parents hoped she would choose a safer path – perhaps building a medical career in Kyiv instead of moving deeper into the war.
“At first they reacted exactly how you would imagine,” she says with a brief smile. “Like: ‘Where are you going? Why would you do this?’”
But the longer she remained in Ukraine, the stronger the feeling became that she needed to contribute directly. “I didn’t really have doubts,” she says. “I understood my parents needed me. But I also understood I needed to be here.”
From training to Donbas
In spring 2024, she finally signed her contract and joined. The first weeks were physically brutal. She remembers basic military training in forests under instructors connected to assault units. Endless running, digging and carrying equipment. Within one month, she says, she lost two clothing sizes.
“At the time I thought it was the end of the world,” she recalls with a laugh.
Not long afterward, she was deployed eastward toward Donbas – areas around Vuhledar, Kurakhove and Selydove – where casualty numbers were often significantly higher than what she sees now near Kharkiv.
“In the Donbas, there were times when we evacuated six or eight wounded people in one day,” Marina recalls. “Sometimes several rounds of casualties within one or two days.”
Then came quieter periods. Then assaults again. The rhythm never stayed stable for long.
“War is nonlinear,” she emphasizes.
Under drone threat
Outside the van, another detonation echoes faintly somewhere across the fields. Then suddenly, someone knocks hard against the door. One of Marina’s colleagues leans inside. Everyone around him is already moving faster now. “We need to go. Right now.”
A Russian reconnaissance drone has reportedly been spotted over the area. The concern is not merely first-person view (FPV) drones anymore, but the possibility of follow-up strikes using heavier weapons – missiles or rockets directed toward exposed positions.
Within moments, the atmosphere changes completely. Engines start. Doors slam shut. Conversations stop mid-sentence. The van turns back across the dry fields toward the main road leading toward Kharkiv.
On the return route, smoke rises in the distance somewhere toward the front. There are no anti-drone nets above these open stretches of land. Everyone inside the vehicle knows that. Only after reaching roads protected by long corridors of netting does the tension slowly ease again.
For Bandana, such abrupt transitions between waiting and danger have become routine. The hardest moments, however, are often not the explosions themselves, but the people attached to them.
One evacuation near Kharkiv still stays with her. A close friend from her unit had been returning from positions when an FPV drone carrying a blast charge struck the vehicle.
“He told me his legs were hurting,” Marina says. At first, she assumed tourniquets had already been applied. Pain from properly tightened tourniquets is common. But once she could properly examine him under light, she realized there were no tourniquets at all.
“He had two open fractures,” she says. “There was panic. They didn’t manage to provide proper help before.” The man’s legs were catastrophically damaged. His hand had also been torn open badly enough that tendons were visible.
“The main thing was to get him into the car and leave immediately,” Marina remembers. “The sky was under enemy control.” Doctors later spent two months trying to save his legs. In the end, both had to be amputated. “But at least he survived,” she says. “For him, that’s what matters most now.”
“You just do the work”
Another time, her own husband – who serves in the same battalion as an evacuation medic – was wounded.
Technically, she explains, it is considered psychologically easier and therefore more effective when someone without a personal connection handles the evacuation procedures. Emotional attachment can interfere with medical judgment. Yet she went anyway.
“You don’t turn off emotions,” Marina reflects. “You just put work and professionalism first. The emotions come later.”
Over time, she believes people adapt to almost anything. “A person gets used to everything. Any stress. The important thing is understanding why you are here.”
“You just do the work. Otherwise it would be mentally impossible.”
Still, there are moments from which she cannot fully distance herself. Evacuation teams are not responsible only for the wounded. Sometimes they retrieve the dead as well.
Marina shakes her head slightly. “It’s not difficult,” she says after a pause. “It’s just unfair. These people should not have died like that,” she continues. “Especially when the condition of the bodies is so severe that families cannot even bury them properly.”
In the moment, she explains, there is no time to emotionally process what is happening. The focus narrows entirely to the task itself. “You just do the work,” she says. “Otherwise it would be mentally impossible.”
The emotional weight begins to surface later. “There is sadness, aggression, injustice – all together.”
Usefulness matters more than symbolism
As one of roughly tens of thousands of women serving in Ukraine’s armed forces, Marina is also conscious of the different expectations female soldiers often encounter: “The problem is not that men think women are incapable,” she explains. “The problem is that they want to protect you.”
Sometimes that means being offered lighter tasks or being treated more cautiously by male soldiers. Marina resists that instinct. “You need to be treated as a combat unit,” she insists. “Otherwise you become a burden for everyone around you.”
At the same time, she rejects simplistic ideas that women necessarily bring unique emotional qualities into military life. “We are not here to light up the atmosphere,” she says matter-of-factly. For her, usefulness matters more than symbolism. “If you feel you can be useful here, then this is exactly where you belong.”
“Still my country”
The war, she says, has changed her relationship with Ukraine permanently. “When the war started, I understood I had to be here,” she says. “Ukraine has problems, of course. But it is still my country.”
Not far away, beyond the drone nets and military checkpoints surrounding Kharkiv, the grey zone begins almost immediately. The city and the war now exist side by side, separated only by fields, drones, trenches and stretches of exposed road.
Marina lives inside that space every day – somewhere between evacuation routes, medical kits, waiting, and sudden movement. And like many others here, she has largely stopped trying to think too far ahead.
For now, she says, the only way to endure the war is to live day by day.