When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, Yulia Mykytenko was one of the few Ukrainian women who went straight to the nearest recruitment office to sign up for the war effort. It wasn’t her first time doing so – in 2016, soon after marrying Illia, a young army officer, she herself enlisted and joined the fight against the Russian occupation of the Donbas, which had then been under way for two years.
She later left the military to teach cadets after Illia was killed in combat near Svitlodarsk in February 2018 but she was battle-ready when Vladimir Putin escalated the Russian invasion. Mykytenko was indicative of the way the 2014 invasion gave Ukraine the solid military footing and experience that allowed it to unexpectedly repel the 2022 escalation.
Her account of the past 10 years, as told to the former Irish Times foreign correspondent Lara Marlowe, is one of coming of age first in the Maidan protests of late 2013 and then as a young cadet. As a woman in the Ukrainian army, she was not allowed to take part in combat until the law was changed in 2018. There are inevitable encounters with sexism – when she was first made a leader of a reconnaissance platoon in 2017, 16 of its 20 men requested a transfer out – but she also acknowledges that the war has accelerated a change in attitudes.
The greatest strength of this book is its nuanced portrait of sentiment in wartime Ukraine. We see the country as far from the always-united embattled David squaring up to the Russian Goliath that it is viewed as in the West. There is a disconnect between soldiers and civilians; scorn for Ukrainians who remain abroad when much of the country has stabilised. And there is also plenty of criticism of, as well as grudging respect for, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, whose dismissal of the popular Valerii Zaluzhnyi as commander-in-chief of the armed forces earlier this year was greeted with bitterness by the troops.
You imagine Mykytenko’s account was vetted by the military before publication*, which makes its frankness all the more remarkable. But, then again, allowing such a dissenting text to come out enables Ukraine to make a point about the society it is defending: showing that, unlike Russia, it is a country where differing viewpoints are tolerated, and even encouraged.
* Lara Marlowe contacted us after publication of this review to point out that the book was not vetted by the military before publication.
