Maryna Mytsiuk spends her free time at a shooting range outside Kyiv, hyper-focused on hitting her targets. She's got to practice. She's waiting for a call that, any day, will send her to war.
"Of course, I'd like to be in a combat position," said Mytsiuk, a 27-year-old folklore scholar who speaks Japanese and works at a nonprofit. "With my build and height, I'm not a natural fit for that … so I'm training very hard."
She is among a growing number of Ukrainian women joining the military as Russia's full-scale war on the country nears its fourth year, and troops remain in short supply. This comes as an end to the fighting appears no closer than it was when President Trump took office in January vowing to quickly broker peace.
Mytsiuk said the Ukrainian military has become much more receptive to women since the early days of the full-scale invasion, when Ukrainian men were lining up at recruitment centers to become soldiers.
She wanted to sign up, too, but was told she would be best off in the kitchen, she said, "where I could make dumplings."
Mytsiuk, however, plowed ahead. She enrolled at a military university for a second degree, graduating this summer. She looked into several brigades and applied to those with special forces units. She had difficult conversations with her mother and her boyfriend, a soldier. Both strongly oppose her decision.