“Find him and fuck him,” we read on his unit’s crest. Yana Zalevskaïa, 22 years old, kamikaze drone pilot within the 59e motorized infantry brigade, in the vicinity of Avdiïvka, an industrial city in Donbass, current epicenter of the fighting, sits up straight in his chair. With a cup of tea in hand, she enjoys a few hours of leave in a house near Pokrovsk, 35 km from the front, because today she is not in good shape and coughs frequently. In a deep voice, with machine gun delivery and a martial tone, the young woman, with long black hair and a slender figure, recounts her unusual journey.
“I come from Kherson [ville du sud de l’Ukraine]where I spent two months under Russian occupation, she begins. Before the invasion, I never imagined having anything to do with the military. I am not disciplined by nature. But I saw the “Russian world” [dont Vladimir Poutine se présente comme le défenseur] and I understood that I cannot live there. Three of my friends were arrested by Russian soldiers and have since disappeared. You never know what to expect with them. »
Mother of a little girl and married – she strongly refuses to give any additional personal information – Yana Zalevskaïa then seeks by all means to leave the occupied zone. She achieved this 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, to shoot a weapon. » For a long time, however, his voluntarism came up against the reluctance of Ukrainian army recruiters.
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“I applied unsuccessfully to three recruitment offices, first in Mykolaiv, then in Kherson [après la libération de la ville en novembre 2022]. Nobody wanted me. I heard everything: too weak, too young, no experience, “where were you in 2014?” [date du début de l’agression russe dans le Donbass]. But I was 13 at the time! Once, I was received by a lady of a certain age wearing heavy makeup, who visibly saw me as a rival… ridiculous! »
Finally, his father, a press officer, managed to get him a temporary military record. Like the vast majority of women enlisted in the Ukrainian army, she received tactical medicine training to become a nurse. But holding a gun makes her itch. She trains with a reconnaissance group and in the role of sniper. “It takes a lot of physical endurance to be a sniper and my commander told me that snipers don’t live long…” In March, she ended up receiving three weeks of training to pilot FPV drones, a new weapon that everyone is talking about on the battlefield.
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