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‘I can do the same job as a man’: Ukraine’s first frontline female commander on war, grief – and her hope for the future

Yulia Mykytenko leads a platoon of men in a reconnaissance and attack unit – and has already lost her husband, father and many friends in the devastating war. In her memoir, she writes that she was always destined for combatThe sound of birdsong is so loud outside Yulia Mykytenko’s current home, an abandoned house somewhere in the Donbas region of Ukraine, that I can hear it through my laptop. We’re speaking on Zoom, Mykytenko visible briefly – young, wearing black, her dark bobbed hair with blue-dyed streaks in it – before she turns the camera off because her signal isn’t great. She has some outside space and, she says with a laugh, a local sheep sometimes comes to visit her dog. Mykytenko, a lieutenant in the Ukrainian army, also feeds the street cats, pets abandoned by residents who ...

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