Most Ukrainians are used to their mothers telling them to wear a hat when it’s cold and eat plenty of soup. But 21-year-old Mariia’s mum had a very different suggestion for her – joining the army together.
Mariia and her family used to live in Lysychansk, Luhansk Oblast. In 2020, Mariia entered the National Guard Academy in Kharkiv, but in 2022 her parents were forced to move to Dnipro due to the full-scale war and the Russian occupation.
In their new home city, Mariia’s mother, Olha, found a job as a nurse in a private clinic. But one day she saw an advertisement for military service and decided to change her life dramatically.
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Mariia advised her mother to join the 13th Khartiia Brigade of the National Guard of Ukraine. Soon after graduating from the academy, she joined the brigade herself.
Today Olha, 48, is a junior sergeant and a nurse in a mobile dental unit, and Mariia is an officer in Khartiia’s personnel department.
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Mariia’s older brother also serves as a combat medic in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and their father, who worked in the State Emergency Service for more than 30 years and has now retired, supports them in the rear.
Ukrainska Pravda.Zhyttia talked to mother and daughter about their “military” upbringing and childhood in Lysychansk, their favourite family service moments, and why recruiting women to the military is so important.
“Sometimes soldiers are afraid of the dentist, like children”
Olha in her mobile dental unit
Photo: Alina Andrieieva for the Khartiia Brigade
Olha devoted over 20 years of her life to working in the maternity ward of a hospital in Lysychansk, Luhansk Oblast.
She started working there as a nurse back in 1994, becoming a senior nurse when the neonatal intensive care unit opened.
Olha cared for generations of newborns, and had it not been for the war, she would never have left.
“I never thought about changing my profession. I really enjoyed working with newborn babies and their mothers,” Olha says. “But life turned out in such a way that we left everything behind. Fate decided for us.”
Olha and Mariia
Photo: Alina Andrieieva for the Khartiia Brigade
After moving to Dnipro, Olha got a job in a private clinic. At the time, her daughter was a second-year student at the National Guard Academy in Kharkiv, majoring in language support.
One day Olha told her daughter: “I saw an ad [for service in Ukraine’s…
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