EXCLUSIVEThe Ukrainian women taking men's places on the frontline: As volunteers run low and thousands flee conscription, Kyiv's fearless women include mother-turned-sniper Anastasia who is returning to battle despite losing her leg
Anastasia woke before dawn. She had slept fitfully in a bunker near the frontline in south-east Ukraine. It was November and the temperature was zero, but it felt even colder – artillery and airstrikes had destroyed the spindly trees leaving fields exposed to the wind. The constant rumble of artillery vibrated through the mud walls. The enemy was very close.
Like everyone else in 118th Mechanised Brigade, a unit of the Ukrainian ground forces created in February 2023 when the army was expanding in preparation for the summer offensive, 25-year-old Anastasia Tarnavskaia – code name, Phoenix – was utterly worn out.
She'd been in the army for 18 months, having joined up out of a desire to protect Yarema, her five-year-old son, and her parents, who lived a 13-hour drive away in Lviv, west Ukraine.
Ukraine does not conscript women – unlike men – but it is running out of soldiers: 31,000 have been killed in action since February 2022 (although no official figures have been released) and many don't want to face the obvious risks. According to reports, at least 20,000 men have dodged the draft and fled Ukraine illegally, while officials in recruitment centres have been discovered taking bribes of up to £1,200 to help them avoid it.
Put bluntly, with the country now in its third year of grinding conflict, it needs its women to fight.
Anastasia, 25, joined the 118th Mechanised Brigade out of a desire to protect her young son
Anastasia was sent back to the frontline in Zaporizhzhia and took cover in a smaller, cruder dugout occupied by dead Russian soldiers
As a result, the upper age limit for women who want to sign up has been raised from 40 to 60. Women are taking on previously male roles as drivers, drone pilots, machine gunners, and snipers – like Anastasia.
That morning – November 28, 2023 – the commander of the battalion sent her and the rest of her troop back to base, where they tried to warm up after their night in the bunker. 'We couldn't feel our arms or legs,' she says. But they soon had an urgent message. The Russians were retreating but help was needed to hold them off as they went.
Anastasia was sent back to the frontline in Zaporizhzhia and now took cover in a smaller, cruder dugout occupied by dead Russian soldiers.
'I had to sit on someone and could hear his spine breaking under my weight.' The shelling was ferocious: just two or three seconds between each explosion.
Suddenly, there was a whirring sound overhead in the sky – a multi-rotor drone zeroing in on their position, about to drop a bomb. Then, a miracle... Minutes before, she'd radioed her coordinates to the battalion command. There was an explosion. Then silence. The drone had been intercepted.
The commander ordered a retreat. We're safe, she thought. Anastasia turned to walk back through the barren field, and that was the moment she saw a dip in the ground. A fraction of a second later, the landmine exploded beneath her.
'You know, I was lucky I lost only one leg,' Anastasia says now, smiling on our Zoom call. She's talking from the sofa in the sitting room of her home in Lviv. It's warm and comfortable with art works on the walls. She's dressed casually in a red top and is film-star beautiful with olive skin and dark eyebrows that accentuate her facial expressions. Lviv, she tells me, is calm, with picturesque cobbled streets and cafes. 'You can forget the war is going on here,' she says.
But then she holds up a photograph: Anastasia on the battlefield, grinning in a helmet and full body armour with three others from her battalion. It was taken a month before the mine exploded.
'The guy on the left was killed two days after I got injured,' she says. 'So many have died.'
Being a sniper on the battlefield wasn't like in the films, 'where you are lying on the ground, just watching, and you can have a cup of coffee beside you'. Around villages near Robotyne and then Novoprokopivka, strategic hotspots in the drive to push back the Russian frontline in the Zaporizhzhia disrict, she found industrial-scale violence of a type unknown in Europe since the Second World War. This war is not about one-on-one sniping, she says, but about artillery and drones, which churn up the earth and pockmark the landscape with craters.
She was under constant shelling. Soldiers on the front in Ukraine have a maxim: 'If you want to live, dig.'
'We had to dig a lot,' she says. Trenches, hides, dugouts.
Anastasia on the battlefield, grinning in a helmet and full body armour with three others from her battalion. She says the soldier on her left was killed two days after she got injured
Anastasia with her son Yarema, five, who she is now with in Lviv
Her primary responsibility was to observe and inform troops about the location of the enemy. She got used to darting through the woods at night, wearing night-vision devices, trying to spot the heat signatures of bodies and tanks.
Now, of course, there is no more running. She doesn't downplay the horror: her left leg was amputated below the knee, and the right leg badly torn by shrapnel. She has had to learn to walk with a prosthetic leg. But she doesn't want to dwell on it, either. Some people have lost both legs, or both legs and arms, she says. 'Mine is not so bad. It's all about attitude. I am not going to be depressed about this.'
Her son thinks it's 'kind of cool, and that mum is going to be a robot'.
'He understands it's for the war. He understands how I lost my leg. He says, 'Mum, you need to watch your step.'
Anastasia grew up in Lviv. Her father fought in the Ukrainian army when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and her mother is a nurse. Anastasia met her son Yarema's father when she was in her teens (the couple are now divorced), and worked in her son's kindergarten and then for the Hyundai car company, where she booked in car services. 'I sat at a computer, counting the hours until the end of the day.'
When Russia invaded, Anastasia agreed to take Yarema to Poland. They left the house when it was still dark and her father drove them to the bus station in Lviv. He put them on a bus to Warsaw, but they got off a few minutes later because Yarema started crying. He didn't want to leave home; Anastasia didn't want to leave her country. Her father was still waiting by his car.
'He was happy to see us, but also upset. We all understand it's not safe here.'
Adventurous and outdoorsy, Anastasia took a survival course camping out in the Carpathian mountains as a teenager and competed in equestrian sports. She was thinking of following her father into the army even before the invasion.
'I thought it would be exciting,' she says. When war came, it made her all the more determined. 'I didn't feel like I had a choice. I had my son, my family to protect.'
Anastasia in rehab after losing her leg in a drone strike. 'You know, I was lucky I lost only one leg,' Anastasia says
After spending time in hospitals in Dnipro and Kyiv, she was referred to the Superhumans Center in Lviv, a rehabilitation centre for amputees
She joined up with her close friend Roksolana, 30, who lives in the same apartment block. They did their training together and served in the same unit. Roksolana is still deployed with 118th battalion.
Ukrainian women have served in the armed forces since the First World War, but the number of roles for women expanded significantly when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, and then expanded again two years ago.
More than 43,000 women were serving in Ukraine's armed forces last November, according to the Ukrainian Defence Ministry, a rise of 40 per cent since 2021. More than 18,000 have children, including more than 2,500 single mothers. Over 5,000 women have been deployed to the frontline. In August last year, some media outlets reported that 106 women had been killed in combat roles. President Zelensky often makes a point of using a female derivative of the Ukrainian word for 'defender', acknowledging both the men and the women who are defending the country.
Anastasia's training lasted five months and included tutorials, marching drills, first aid, landmark navigation, the art of concealment as well as practical sessions shooting rounds on a firing range, at first in the Territorial Defence Forces, and then, after chosing her specialism, in the 118th Brigade. 'There were times when the men tried to reduce our workload,' Anastasia says. 'But us girls didn't allow it. It's about equal conditions.'
But still she had to make do with battle fatigues designed for men. The Ukrainian Defence Ministry only issued its first custom-made uniforms for women in February – 60,000 sets of light-weight summer uniforms. 'Wearing military uniforms made for men is like a man wearing a bra – uncomfortable,' one Ukrainian female solider is reported to have said.
'It was not a good fit,' Anastasia agrees. 'It's very important to be comfortable; to have everything you might need during combat.' In fact Anastasia ended up buying her own uniform and helmet. Her emergency battlefield backpack contained 'bullets, tampons, sanitary pads, wet wipes'.
When the mine exploded, mud and shrapnel rained in every direction. The blast was so strong it lifted Anastasia off her feet. Despite the pain – 'a strong sensation that my legs ended in my head' – she radioed her commander, who put a tourniquet on each leg and carried her 100 metres to the path. He gave her some water and painkillers. But her mouth was so dry she couldn't swallow. 'The pills just stuck to my teeth.'
It took two hours and 15 minutes for the medevac team to arrive with a stretcher. 'The guys told me to keep talking, to stay conscious, so I did,' she said. 'How long has it been?' she kept asking. 'I knew that having the tourniquet on for too long could increase the risk of amputation.'
Rescuers extinguish the aftermath of a blast in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, which has been ravaged by attacks from the Kremlin
Ukrainian soldiers join a gun salute for the fallen earlier this year, with 31,000 killed in action since February 2022
She remembers being loaded into a car, and she remembers arriving at the medical aid centre, where medics tried to cut-off her trousers. 'No! no! Please don't cut my trousers! They cost 8,000 hryvnia (£156)!' Then she blacked out. When she came to, they were about to cut off her T-shirt and jacket too. 'Not my jacket!' she said. 'I found the strength to sit up so they could take it off without cutting it.' The pain was unbearable, she says, but, even then, she seems to have been resigned to losing her leg: 'It's war. It happens.'
She still has her army jacket and trousers, along with her talisman which she carried in her pocket: a symbol of a phoenix, a gift from Roksolana.
After spending time in hospital in Dnipro and then in Kyiv, she was referred to the Superhumans Center, in Lviv, a rehabilitation and medical centre for soldiers and civilians living with amputations from the war. She's finding it difficult to get around as her temporary prosthetic leg is very heavy. 'In two weeks, I'll have a new one made of carbon, which is lighter. I'm just waiting for the right foot size.' She's thinking about having a sports prosthetic device which would be even lighter.
'I don't dwell on how hard it is without my leg since I can't change anything, so I adapt to the prosthesis as if it were my own leg. It can be a challenge at times, but it's still early in the process. I'm still adapting to the new me.'
She plans to continue serving in the army 'probably as an instructor'.
Meanwhile she is enjoying time at home and some of the perks of not being on the frontline. 'My friend is a nail artist' she says, showing me her manicured nails with undisguised exuberance. Painted nails, without a doubt, are not allowed in the army.
'I recently had a dream,' she continues, 'The whole of Ukraine was covered in red. The enemy was everywhere. I was desperate to get back to the front.'
With the war in its third year, the Ukrainian army is worn out, she says. They are running out of soldiers but they have at last got the military aid they need. 'But as long as the enemy is assaulting us, we will not give up.'
