“The story of Yulia Mykytenko is a war diary, the portrait of a patriot with a big heart and a moral lesson”

“The story of Yulia Mykytenko is a war diary, the portrait of a patriot with a big heart and a moral lesson”
“The story of Yulia Mykytenko is a war diary, the portrait of a patriot with a big heart and a moral lesson”

JJanuary 2024, village of Zakyne, Donbass front, Ukraine. “Last night I told my team to leave the front. We had been under fire for twenty-four hours. We couldn't even launch a drone to see where the shots were coming from. (…) No need to stay there. » The lieutenant knows what she's doing. She has experience, already several years on the front line. She commands an aerial reconnaissance section of 25 men equipped with drones – “our birds”, “our babies”.

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The 28-year-old's name is Yulia Mykytenko. She spoke to the Franco-American journalist Lara Marlowe. And, from this long testimony, the star columnist of theIrish Times from Dublin has produced a key book to understand what the war in Ukraine is: How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying (“fortunately, I am not afraid of dying”, ed. Head of Zeus, London, 2024, untranslated). Scroll here, page after page, a story of bravery, a war diary, the portrait of a patriot with a big heart, a moral lesson, a piece of political history of Ukraine. In short, and masterfully told, the answer to this simple question: why are Ukrainians dying?

There is trench warfare. Yulia's section patrols 50 kilometers of a front of 1,200. More than a century after the First World War, life in the trenches has hardly changed: the cold, the mud, the lack of sleep, the rats that swarm and come to feed on the corpses – Russian and Ukrainian. Together, the body armor and helmet weigh more than 10 kilos. “Each of our drones can detect enemy movement within a radius of 10 to 15 kilometerssaid Lieutenant Mykytenko. We are monitoring the Russian lines, the movements which announce an assault on our trenches. Ukrainian artillery fire is directed. A large part of our mission is also to recover our dead and our wounded. (…) You have to decide the right time, it's my responsibility to choose who goes, and I often go with them. »

Escaping the Russian Boot

On leave at the end of October, Yulia came to present her book in . Fine features, high cheekbones, adolescent face, soft voice, military outfit fitted at the waist, a lock of sparkling blue colored hair, she recounts her war without boasting. She pauses, the words are whispered, becoming barely audible, when she talks about her deaths. A husband, Illia, killed in combat, as well as around twenty close friends. She saw all the savagery of so-called “high intensity” warfare. She was born in 1995, four years after Ukraine's independence. Poor family from the kyiv region: we speak Russian and read Pushkin and Lermontov at home, but we have Ukrainian patriotism in our hearts.

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