by Lara Marlowe
Published by Melville House
February 4, 2025
312 pages
ISBN 9781685891879
Summary-Review by Uliana Pasicznyk
This book relates the remarkable life story of Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko, soldier and officer in Ukraine’s army. The story is told in her own words, as conveyed by journalist and war correspondent Lara Marlowe, and is based on a series of conversations they held during 2023. Most of these were conducted online, during Lieutenant Mykytenko’s active military duty in the Donbas, and she continues to serve in wartime Ukraine’s army today.
Born in 1995 in Kyiv, Yulia Mykytenko grew up in a Russian-speaking family; only after entering the University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, planning to study languages and translation, did she begin speaking Ukrainian regularly. In November 2013, when protests against the Yanukovych government began in central Kyiv, she became active in defending the Maidan square and Ukraine’s independence during its Revolution of Dignity. After Russia’s invasion of Crimea and incursions in eastern Ukraine developed into an escalating war, Yulia finished her university degree but decided on a very different career path. Like her husband, Ilia, she joined a volunteer military unit at the front in the Donbas, specializing in the use of military drones. Tragically, in 2018 Ilia died from wounds he suffered in combat, and in 2020 her father, a war veteran with uncompromising political convictions, took his own life in protest against any concessions to Russia’s territorial demands. After a period of grief and bereavement, Yulia returned to military service, her commitment to serving Ukraine and determination that its army succeed in repelling Russia now absolute. She trained and began serving as an army officer herself and became an instructor and supervisor of the first class for women soldiers at one of Ukraine’s top military academies.
In telling her story, Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko also depicts her family life and much about Ukraine and its society, past and present. After her parents’ divorce when she was a young child, Yulia was raised largely by her devoted, busy mother and extended family in rural and small-city Ukraine, including in Bucha, now infamous for what happened there in March of 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Until the events of 2013-14, her father fervently believed that because Russia and Ukraine had a shared past, they were and should remain brother nations. As a volunteer, private, and then lieutenant, Yulia encountered discrimination, sexism, and inequality in the military command structure, as well as skepticism toward her as an officer and wariness of the male soldiers under her command, whose confidence and loyalty she had to earn. She gives vivid accounts of dangerous situations, debilitating fatigue, demoralization, and inadequate equipment, as well as of successful operations and challenges met. In relating her experience of working with her superior officers and being in command of experienced soldiers and new recruits, she talks of camaraderie, bravery, the loss of fellow soldiers in battle, and her dedication to being a good leader of the men in her platoon. Most poignantly, she shares memories of her beloved, courageous husband, their marriage, simultaneous military service, and his death, leaving her a widow at 23. Having experienced all this, she, like the poet Vasyl Stus in his famed poem by the same title, in effect declares “How good it is that I have no fear of dying,” for she has chosen to live a life of dedication to her country and people, without “hatred, curses, or regret.”
Reading Yulia Mykytenko’s story in this book requires some attentiveness. It is related not linearly or chronologically but in overlapping chapters, reflecting that on her end the conversations on which it is based were held at the front and were sometimes subject to interruption. In relating it, Lieutenant Mykytenko at times candidly voices perplexed or critical views of political and military matters, for instance, ambivalence about how much Ukraine can rely on NATO and the West for support and the substance of President Zelensky’s leadership. She also shares elements of the military code of honour left to her by her father and husband, such as “Never show weakness” and “Remember: fate chooses you, not the reverse.”
My own experience with this book indicates the benefits and boon of book club membership. I did not know of this book’s publication, and the story of a woman officer serving in Ukraine’s army during wartime is not one I as an individual would have chosen to read. Yet I gained much from my reading of it and am glad for the encounter.
