"Find him and fuck him," read her unit's patch. Yana Zalevskaya, 22, is a kamikaze drone pilot with the 59th Motorized Infantry Brigade, in the vicinity of Avdiyevka, an industrial city in the Donbas, the current epicenter of the fighting. She sat upright in her chair. Holding a cup of tea, she was enjoying a few hours of leave in a house near Pokrovsk, 35 kilometers from the front, as she was not feeling well that day and was coughing frequently. In a deep, machine-gun-like voice and martial tone, the young woman, with her long black hair and slender figure, recounted her unusual journey.
"I come from Kherson [a town in southern Ukraine], where I spent two months under Russian occupation," she began. "Before the invasion, I never imagined I'd have anything to do with the army. I'm not disciplined by nature. But I saw the 'Russian world' [of which Vladimir Putin presents himself as the defender] and I understood that I can't live there. Three of my friends were arrested by Russian soldiers and have since disappeared. You never know what to expect with them."
The mother of a little girl and married – she strongly refused to give any further personal details – Zalevskaya tried by all means to leave the occupied zone. She succeeded after two months of unsuccessful attempts, at the end of April 2022. "As soon as I escaped, I tried to join the army, to learn how to defend myself, how to shoot a gun." For a long time, however, her determination ran up against the reluctance of Ukrainian army recruiters.
"I went unsuccessfully to three recruitment offices, first in Mykolaiv, then in Kherson [after the city's liberation in November 2022]. Nobody wanted me. I heard it all: too weak, too young, no experience, 'where were you in 2014?' [date of the start of Russian aggression in the Donbas]. But I was 13 at the time! I was once received by a lady of a certain age in a ton of make-up, who obviously saw me as a rival... ridiculous!"
Eventually, her father, a press officer, managed to obtain a temporary military pass for her. Like the vast majority of women enlisted in the Ukrainian army, she trained as a tactical medic to become a nurse. But she was itching to hold a weapon. She trained with a reconnaissance group in the role of sniper. "It takes a lot of physical stamina to be a sniper, and my commanding officer told me that snipers don't live long..." she said. In March, she ended up receiving three weeks' training to fly FPV drones, a new weapon everyone was talking about on the battlefield.
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