‘If I met my 18-year-old self, we’d probably fight’: A Ukrainian soldier on war, prejudice and unlikely friendships

Her callsign, Femka, began as an insult.

“I once did training with a very radical group, and I asked the instructors to take down flags depicting naked, sexualized women,” she recalled. “After that, they started calling me Femka behind my back. So I thought it would be post-ironic to take it as my callsign.”

The nickname is a dismissive slang term derived from “feminist.” Femka decided to make it her own.

From law school to the military

Femka grew up in Chernihiv and moved to Kyiv in 2021 to study law at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, one of Ukraine’s leading universities. She also worked for a human rights organization and was involved in civic initiatives.

She had just turned 18 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“I was completely unsuited to anything involving war,” she said. “I’d always been a princess - I played the piano, talked about the rule of law and was afraid to kill a mosquito.”

She began volunteering to support the military and took tactical medicine courses and other military training. By 2024, she was seriously looking for a unit to join, but wanted to make sure she was prepared rather than becoming, as she put it, “that person everyone looks at and thinks, ‘God, why are you here?’”

In 2025, as she was finishing university, Femka joined the military. She initially served as a lawyer, a role in which she felt confident in her skills and experience.

But she had always intended to move into combat work.

“I wanted women to be represented in combat roles,” she said. “I wanted to feel that I was doing something to defend my country with my own hands.”

She eventually transferred to Khartiia, which had launched a campaign to recruit women for combat roles, and joined the corps in September 2025. She trained as a drone operator and later became part of its R.U.G. Assault Regiment.

‘Feminists don’t belong in the military’

Femka was the only woman in her company during basic military training. Some of the male instructors told her they had never trained women before.

She was determined to do everything on the same terms as the men. She never skipped a training session, volunteered to take command and, as she puts it, made sure she was “the dirtiest person in those trenches.”

“Some of the sergeants joked that we had a matriarchy now that Femka had been in command,” she said.

Not everyone was initially convinced she belonged there.

“There were people who would say, ‘There are no feminists in the military. There are no lesbians in the military,’ and then later say, ‘Sorry, you’re actually cool.’ A lot of people changed.”

For Femka, those encounters became evidence that prejudice could change through something much simpler than an argument: knowing the person you had previously reduced to a stereotype.

“People are often in their own bubbles,” she said. “I realized that contact and dialogue really work.”

Sometimes, however, the assumptions she encountered were less hostile than overprotective. Whenever training required carrying something heavy, Femka would volunteer - only to find men rushing over to stop her.

“As soon as I walked up to a box of ammunition, ten men would run over: ‘You’re not doing that!’ And I’d be like, ‘No, I am! Because I’ll have to do it in combat.’”

By the end, she said, she was practically wrestling ammunition out of their hands.

The same assumptions followed her as she moved toward a combat role. Men meeting her for the first time would sometimes tell her she would end up doing administrative work.

“I’d say, ‘No, please,’” she recalled.

Administrative work was important, she stressed. It simply was not what she had joined the unit to do.

She wanted to fly drones.

‘OK, that’s a severed arm’

Femka’s first combat deployment did not go as planned. Along with learning the practical realities of setting up a drone position, she became seriously ill and had to be evacuated and hospitalized.

She feared that after all the work it had taken to reach a combat role, her body might prevent her from staying there. But she decided to try again. She has now been deploying to combat positions for about six months without the illness recurring.

Femka primarily flies reconnaissance drones, supporting assaults, directing artillery fire and providing aerial surveillance. The hardest part, she says, is sometimes being forced to watch events unfold on a screen without being able to intervene.

“You want to kill the enemy, but you can’t,” she said. “Sometimes I start complaining that I don’t want to do reconnaissance anymore - I want to do strikes.”

Then, during a recent mission, watching was no longer her only option.

Femka and her fellow soldiers were leaving a position in an armored vehicle when it broke down in the middle of a field. As they took cover and tried to repair it, a Russian FPV drone struck nearby.

They heard screaming and ran toward it. Several soldiers had suffered severe injuries, including traumatic amputations.

What surprised Femka was how little she hesitated.

“Because I’d been training all this time, including with Khartiia, I already had the algorithm in my head,” she recalled. “I was like: ‘OK, that’s a severed arm. That means I need to put a tourniquet on it.’”

She applied the tourniquet and helped move the wounded to a safer location. But Russian forces had spotted them and began sending more FPV drones toward the area.

Femka had to move back and forth between treating the wounded and taking cover as drones approached.

“I understood that if I got wounded, I wouldn’t be able to help them and I’d just become another tactical problem,” she said.

An evacuation team eventually reached them. The soldiers also managed to shoot down an FPV drone that was flying toward the wounded, and Femka helped evacuate one of the injured men on a trailer attached to an ATV.

“When we got back, my whole face was covered in dirt. You could only see my eyes,” she said. “That’s my favorite photo.”

The wounded soldiers survived and are now undergoing treatment and rehabilitation.

One of them had suffered a severe injury to his arm. In the middle of the evacuation, he told Femka he believed the damage was limited to the lower part of the limb and asked whether she could reposition his tourniquet.

It was a difficult procedure under the circumstances, but during a brief lull Femka checked for additional injuries and moved it.

Later, she learned that the soldier had lost fingers, but most of his hand and arm had been saved.

“A few years ago, I used to faint at the sight of blood,” Femka said. “After several years of training and regularly working on it, I was able to react calmly.”

For her, the experience proved something larger.

“You can train a person to become almost anything. You just have to want it.”

‘If I met my 18-year-old self, we’d probably fight’

Femka does not pretend that being a woman in the military means sexism disappears. Sometimes, she said, people do not take her seriously or assume she ended up in the army on a whim.

But the military has also introduced her to people she would probably never have met - or befriended - in her previous life.

“I never could have imagined that my best friend would be a 38-year-old electrician from Kamianske,” she said.

They met during training. Femka was talking about the risks women can face when wearing more revealing clothes in public when he interrupted her.

“He came up to me and said, ‘Ma’am, but she can wear whatever she wants, because that’s absolutely her right.’ And I was like, ‘Wow. It’s really cool that you’re explaining this to me instead of me explaining it to you.’”

They became close friends, trained together and eventually joined the same unit. They still deploy to positions together.

“I know everything about his daughter, and he knows everything about my girlfriends,” Femka said.

Encounters like that forced her to examine not only other people’s prejudices, but her own.

“If I met my 18-year-old self now, we’d probably get into a fight,” she said.

Back then, she described herself as highly idealistic and immature, living in a world where everyone, figuratively speaking, recycled their trash, drank matcha lattes and discussed the problems facing marginalized groups.

The military confronted her with a much broader range of lives.

She met people who did not spend much time thinking about the rule of law or global social issues, but about how to feed their families in small towns where jobs were scarce and opportunities limited.

“I realized you can’t judge people for not knowing something,” she said. “We always have to make contact and have a dialogue. Closing yourself off and calling someone an idiot isn’t going to achieve anything.”

The lesson worked both ways. Some soldiers who had never knowingly spent time with a lesbian or a feminist changed their assumptions after serving alongside her. Femka, meanwhile, learned that the social and cultural markers she once used to understand people could tell her very little about who they actually were.

“There’s no point living in your own little bubble,” she said.

Some of her closest friends in the military are men in their 50s whom she says she would probably never have encountered in her civilian life.

“I adore even these older guys who would see me and say, ‘Come here, daughter,’ and give me candy,” she recalled. “And I’d think, ‘Fine, I’m never going to explain to them that I’m not their daughter.’”

For Femka, those unlikely friendships have become evidence that people with radically different backgrounds can find common ground.

“If I can become friends with them, then all of us can understand each other,” she said. “I don’t want to shut myself inside my comfort zone. I want to see people and understand them, because that’s the only way we can do something together.”

There are still days when she asks herself why she joined the military at all.

“I think, ‘God, why did I do this? I could have stayed in Kyiv and kept volunteering,’” she said.

One reason she stays is a close female friend from her previous unit. They shared similar values, became close and had planned to serve in combat together. But as Femka was transferring to a combat role, her friend was killed.

“No fundraiser or memorial plaque could ever be worthy of her memory,” Femka said. “The only way I can truly honor her is by doing the combat work she talked about so much.”

Her friend had believed Femka could do it even when, as she puts it, everything about her old life suggested otherwise - the “princess,” the intellectual, the young woman who once seemed profoundly unsuited for war.

So despite the days when she thinks she has had enough, Femka keeps going.

“It’s still not enough,” she said. “We all have to keep working. It’s the only thing that matters when you’re fighting for survival.”

In 2025, the Khartiia Brigade was the first among the units of the Defense Forces to conduct a campaign to recruit women for technological positions . Recently, the Khartiia Corps launched an advertising campaign to attract Ukrainian servicemen to the R.U.G. regiment, under the slogan “Combat Amigos are looking for Ukrainians for rear positions.” You can join the regiment by calling the recruiting center at 6660.