I run intake at a small animal rescue on the east side of Kharkiv — the kind of place with a busted screen door and a coffee maker that's older than half my volunteers. I've worked there nine years. In that time I've seen every version of grief a person can bring in with a cardboard carrier: dogs left behind when a building came down, cats pulled out of basements three weeks after the shelling stopped. But I never expected to learn something about the war from a woman with a Moscow accent standing in my parking lot at six in the morning, hauling crates out of a rusted Lada Niva.
Her name was Yulia Nazarenko. That's not her real name — she asked me not to use it, and I won't, not even now. What I can tell you is where she came from, because she never hid it: Podolsk, just outside Moscow. She said it flat, no shame and no apology, like she was reading it off an old ID card that didn't belong to her anymore.
She showed up at our shelter for the first time in the spring of 2022, a few weeks after the worst of it. Not to volunteer, exactly — she was there because she'd been driving supply runs for a volunteer unit and kept finding animals nobody could take. A shepherd mix tied to a fence in a village near Izium. Three kittens in a shoebox by a checkpoint. She'd shove them in the Niva between crates of gauze and MREs and bring them to us because, she said, "someone has to."
I want to be honest — my first reaction wasn't warm. We'd lost two boys from our street that spring. Hearing her accent in my doorway did something ugly in my chest before I could stop it. I didn't say anything. I just took the crate.
It took about four visits before she told me anything real. She was twenty-three by then, though she looked younger, thinner than she should've been, with a scar along her jaw she never explained. She'd left Russia at nineteen — walked out of an apartment in Podolsk with one duffel bag and never went back. Not for university, not for a job. She told me once, standing by the intake desk with a half-drunk cup of the shelter's terrible instant coffee going cold in her hand, that she made the decision at fifteen, the year Russia took Crimea, and spent four years quietly building the courage to act on it.
She'd wanted to enlist properly. Couldn't — her passport was the wrong color, and no branch of the Armed Forces would touch her. So she found a volunteer unit through a contact online, some encrypted channel a friend passed her, and did a month of selection that by her account nearly broke her. Combat first aid. Demolitions basics. And rifle work, which turned out to be the thing she was actually good at. Before that, she told me — and I only half believed her until another volunteer confirmed it — she'd done some modeling work in Moscow. Print stuff, nothing glamorous. The unit ribbed her mercilessly for it at first. Called her a plant, a Russian asset, joked she must be an actress playing soldier for the cameras. She said she spent six months proving them wrong, one patrol at a time, until nobody joked anymore.
They started calling her "Katana." Not for anything dramatic — there was a cheap replica sword mounted on the wall of their base, and she used to stand in front of it during downtime, arms crossed, just looking at it. The name stuck the way nicknames do in units like that, for no better reason than repetition.
Here's the detail that got me, the one that had nothing to do with the war and everything to do with who she actually was. On the morning of February 24th, she told me, the first thing she thought about wasn't her unit's rally point. It was her animals. She had — still has — a small menagerie of rescued dogs and cats she'd been keeping with her mother, who'd also left Russia years earlier. When the first strikes hit, Yulia spent the early hours not reporting for duty but figuring out how to get six animals somewhere safe before she'd let herself think about anything else. Only after that did she report in.
She fought through Irpin. Through Bucha, though she wouldn't say much about that beyond a look that told me not to ask twice. South, then east. She lost people. She got hurt once badly enough to need three weeks off rotation, though she came back with a limp she still has. Later she trained as a combat medic through one of the volunteer hospital battalions and started pulling people out of vehicles instead of just shooting from them.
The animal thing never stopped, though. That's the part our shelter knows better than anyone. She and her mother — a soft-spoken woman who barely talks, always wearing the same gray cardigan — run something like an informal foster network out of a rented house near Kharkiv. Dogs pulled from combat zones, half-starved cats found in abandoned apartment blocks. Yulia told me flatly, no self-pity in it, that most of the money she makes goes straight into vet bills and dog food. Not rent. Not herself.
I asked her once, straight out, whether she had her Ukrainian citizenship yet — this was maybe a year and a half in, after I'd stopped flinching at the accent and started just seeing her as someone who dropped off animals on her way back from things I didn't want to picture. She got quiet in a way that had nothing performative in it. Said no. Said current law made it essentially impossible for someone with a Russian passport, even someone who'd fought and bled for the country, to get one. She said it demoralized her more than almost anything else that had happened to her, including the shrapnel in her hip.
She wasn't precious about the rest of it either. Told me flat out she sees a psychologist, that she's on medication for the depression that comes with this kind of work, and she said it the way you'd mention a dentist appointment — no drama, just fact. She said asking for help wasn't weakness, it was maintenance, the same as checking oil in the Niva so it wouldn't die on her in the middle of a supply run.
The thing that's stayed with me the longest, though, happened on an ordinary Tuesday, no shelling, no emergency — just her leaning against the shelter's chain-link fence with a cigarette she wasn't really smoking, more holding. Somebody from the local paper had come by to do a piece on our intake numbers and asked her, almost as an afterthought, what scared her most.
She thought about it longer than the question seemed to warrant. Then she said the one thing that's home to her isn't a place she was born into — it's the place she chose, and choosing it, she said, was the only thing about her life she was ever fully sure of. What terrified her wasn't dying here. It was the idea of somehow ending up back there. Back in Podolsk. Back in that apartment. Back in a country she no longer recognized as hers.
She didn't cry saying it. She just crushed the cigarette out against the fence post, picked up an empty crate off the ground, and went back inside to help me clean out the kennels before the evening feeding.
