“Nobody has a story like Yulia,” said journalist Lara Marlowe, in simple praise of the 29-year-old Ukrainian army lieutenant at the centre of her book, How Good It Is I have No Fear Of Dying.
The reasons became apparent as the former Irish Times Paris and Washington correspondent described meeting her subject, the blue-haired Yulia Mykytenko who commands a drone unit on the conflict’s front lines.
Ms Marlowe encountered her as one of a half dozen Ukrainian women she interviewed while covering the war, and quickly realised what “an extraordinary” person she had come upon. She determined to write her story, as a way of writing Ukraine’s, and the pair agreed to meet regularly.
But “Yulia kept cancelling appointments”, Ms Marlowe said at the book’s launch in Dublin on Tuesday. “The first time she cancelled she had a tank column going through her village. The second time...she had a drone pilot who was killed. And the third time she just disappeared [with] no communication for weeks and weeks...she had been under bombardment.”
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Ms Mykytenko joined the army to serve with her husband Illia in Donbas in 2016, later going on to command her 25-man unit. Illia was killed in a Russian attack. The book is based on a series of interviews conducted during the winter of 2023 and 2024.
It was launched by Labour leader Ivan Bacik, who reminded attendees that the young military officer lost her husband and father in the protracted conflict and has encountered things “that no humans should ever witness”.
Ms Marlowe equally underscored the sobering reality of the war personified in her book. “Yulia is fighting for all of us,” she said. “She is fighting dictatorship; she is fighting censorship; she is fighting torture; she is fighting war crimes.”
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