Iryna Shevchenko

Unlike her other colleagues who are now working with the military, on the morning of February 24, Iryna Shevchenko was already on full combat alert. Her unit was located near Pisky, expecting a Russian offensive from that very direction. However, the enemy had a different plan, so the fighting for Pisky began later.

Though Iryna was wrong concerning this particular hunch, she was quite right about the full-scale offensive in general. A year before it began, she posted a photo of herself in military uniform and captioned it “Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come”.

“I have been at war as a journalist since 2014,” Iryna recalls. “At a certain point, I felt that I was no longer interested in covering any issues that didn’t apply to this war while it is still going on. And when you are forced to write about something you aren’t interested in, you don’t get any satisfaction from your work, nor can you do your job well.”

Iryna had regularly visited the combat zone as a member of the Channel 5 crew, and heard that press officers had been looking for assistants. Still, at first, she did not dare to apply for this position, as she was hesitant as to whether her age and gender were suitable. In one of her work trips, Iryna met a press officer’s assistant, a woman around 20 years old, and asked her why she had made such a choice. The latter replied that somebody had to do this job: that was when Iryna decided that she probably could do it too.

On her next trip at the beginning of 2021, Iryna met a battalion commander who was in search of a press soldier. She knew that this was her chance. Besides, she was expecting the war to enter a hot phase, and she realized that in that case her access to the frontline would be restricted. Yet ever since the Revolution of Dignity Iryna knew that it was always the epicenter of the events that constituted the calmest place: it’s there that you are surrounded by people who know what needs to be done and can use the proper weaponry.

In February 2021, Iryna came to the conscription office in her yellow coat and a cap with funny ears. She had her preliminary contract from the battalion commander for the position of assistant rifleman to a grenade launcher operator. The enlistment officer looked at her and said jokingly, “Oh, I could see you with a grenade launcher.” And Iryna eventually mastered this weapon too. She first took up arms in the spring of 2014.

“I was working at Liga.net then,” Iryna recalls, “and there had already been fights in the east. The Maidan territorial defense organized some training in handling weapons, tactical medicine, and the basic principles of street battles. Not that I was much interested in all that stuff: I just realized that it was something I needed to know in wartime.”

She made use of those skills later at the military training field in Desna. That was a harsh experience. The training included constantly wearing body armor, helmets and heavy machine guns. Iryna learnt how to hold a weapon, how to aim, and how to breath properly. Though she was well prepared to withstand physical exertion and life in field conditions due to her old interest in mountain climbing, she had an immediate opportunity to feel how physically exhausting the military service was.

Right up until the day of February 24, Iryna and her battalion had been either on the frontline or at the training field.

“This is what military work looks like you either fight or learn how to fight,” Iryna explains. “You run the risk of losing even the elementary skill of handling a machine gun if it’s not developed. It’s very similar to learning a foreign language.”

Her battalion came to Pisky in November 2021, as Western intelligence began to warn about the invasion. The town resembled a wound that could never heal. Iryna walked around its ruined streets and thought that the Russian intentions regarding the whole of Ukraine were just the same – not to seize or occupy the whole country, but to totally destroy it.

Iryna was strongly convinced that the full-scale war was going to begin. She’s a historian by training, and this helped her to observe the course of the events globally. The conflict could never be frozen as long as Ukraine resisted and convinced the international community that it was not a civil war but an act of external aggression. Under such conditions, Russia could either withdraw its troops or go on with the invasion. The enemy’s choice was entirely obvious.

Nevertheless, no one was ready for what really happened. No one had had an experience of such massive artillery shelling, wide-ranging tactics, building such deep and strong fortifications, or the use of the newest military equipment.

There was no serious advance on Pisky during the first days of the full-scale invasion, so Iryna’s battalion sometimes moved to work in the hotter spots of the Donetsk region, for example, Volnovakha.

“It was in summer that the Russians began advancing in our direction,” Iryna recalls. “They totally destroyed Pisky while storming our positions. First, there were mortar attacks – 82-mm, 120-mm rounds. Then the larger calibers came. The most active phase was a nightmare. I can’t even imagine how the guys managed to withstand more than a week under non-stop artillery shelling. The Russians used everything against them – Grads, tanks, 220-mm mortars, 150-mm mortars, cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs – literally everything but nuclear bombs. And still our guys repelled a number of the assaults and retreated to their rear positions as the Russians ruined Pisky, down to every single basement. Even the so-called ‘military analyst’ Girkin considers the Pisky operation shameful for the Russian army. And that’s absolutely true, because they had perfect logistics near Donetsk, and yet it took them a few months and heavy losses for them to advance just a few kilometers.”

Iryna herself was not in Pisky then: she was located some distance away, with the rest of her battalion. At that time, she fully understood in comparison to others, that the conditions she was experiencing weren’t nearly as harsh. True, she had no regular bathroom, but on the other hand, bombs weren’t falling on her head every now and then. Her sleep was uncomfortable, but still, it was sleep, not being disturbed 24/7 by the enemy.

“I never compare myself to the guys on the front,” says Iryna. “They are superhumans. They stand between life and death, not letting death come any further.” When asked about fear, she says, “When I signed the contract, I realized that I might die a horrible death during the war, but I accepted that possibility. This was my only chance to act logically and probably to escape a horrible death. Yet the fear is still there. Every single serviceperson is afraid. Once, I asked a girl of 22 whether she had ever been afraid of shelling or wanted to run away. She said of course she was afraid, but she never felt like running away because she had people nearby whom she wanted to stay with, to follow through with, and never slacken, so that they could never be ashamed of her. It’s our people nearby that help us to hold on.” 

Each time that the people near Iryna go on a combat mission, she waits for them to come back alive, and celebrates every report of the absence of losses. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. The most anxious was Iryna’s expectation of the guys’ return from Vuhledar.

“The occupiers are just getting rid of their scum, while each one of our soldiers is as good as gold,” says Iryna. “The losses of our fellow Ukrainians hurt a lot, even if they are strangers. Our warriors are the elite because they have chosen their path themselves. They’re a very particular caste of the people, capable of defeating their fears and challenging death itself. It doesn’t matter whether they are PhDs or common farmers: each of them does the impossible in meeting death and stopping it – sometimes at the price of their own lives.”

Iryna feels calmer by their side than she did in her civilian life. She misses nothing but a comfortable bathroom at the frontline. As for the rest, she recalls, they even had an opportunity to order pizza and sushi directly to their positions in Pisky. So she doesn’t feel any anguish or fatigue. Iryna says that she won’t be able to relax until victory because in her thoughts she would still be at the forefront. Active life in the rear does not annoy Iryna: she’s actually glad that the civilians can deal with their own affairs because this means that the defense forces are doing their job well. 

“Many service people want to return back to a serene and peaceful country,” says Iryna. “We don’t need civilians to suffer and strew ashes on their heads all the while. We see enough sorrowful and weary people here.”

Since Iryna joined her battalion, she has had leave just once, to visit her family in Odesa. Her parents moved there from Crimea when Iryna was twelve years old and her father was offered a job at the local philharmonic. Iryna’s ancestors on the maternal side, the Crimean Jews, had lived on the peninsula since the 18th century: so she has always known that it was her land. The same goes for the Donetsk region where her father comes from. Iryna loved it from first sight, although she had never been there until 2014. Her father referred to the Donetsk region with warmth and pain, because it was there that the Bolsheviks had exiled his parents’ family out from their home and deprived them of all their property. Iryna knew that both Crimea and the eastern regions of Ukraine had been forcibly Russified; yet she was sure that those lands were worth fighting for. 

Iryna is confident that the occupied territories will all be reclaimed. In her opinion, the liberation of the Donbas and Crimea is as logical as the full-scale invasion was. At the same time, she considers it necessary to warn civilians against relaxing too much: at the finish line, she insists, it’s of crucial importance to be more focused than ever. No room for error here.

So Iryna does her best to be as efficient as possible regarding the things which depend on her right now. Today she finds herself on the other side of journalism: she accompanies her ex-colleagues, covers the activity of her friends in combat and tells their stories. Since 2014, she has been among those who effectively formed the actual rules of journalists’ work in the combat zone – specifying what could and could not be filmed, how to move around the frontline zone, or how journalists might involuntarily uncover the positions of the military. Those who followed the safety rules at the time are still doing it today. It’s far more difficult to get along with foreigners in this regard because not all of them – except, of course, experienced journalists – have a full idea of what the war is and what’s going on in Ukraine. They rarely understand that some things must never be covered, that the intensity of shelling might force all the crew to lay face down on the ground, or that it’s absolutely forbidden to come to military positions in large groups with producers, because that attracts unwanted attention.

Nevertheless, Iryna is not planning to return to journalism. 

“I feel disappointed by civilian journalism lately,” she admits. “Especially when it comes to the scandalous purchase of products by the Defense Ministry. It was a very messy report, with a lot of serious errors, and the categorical conclusion that the defense minister had to resign. As a serviceperson, I feel I have been let down. The same goes for the purchase of the presumably low-quality body armor: nothing has been proved, and no treason exposed. I cannot understand why people don’t see that it’s only their interest in hot-button issues that have been exploited. Such ignorance causes a lot of harm to the army. It’s a journalism of memes, not facts, and I can’t see myself as being part of it any longer.”

By the end of the interview, Iryna is getting ready to go to the training field to cover more military training. She hopes to catch some moments when the servicemen are unaware of her presence. This will help her to take the best shots, not staged but genuine. And then someone will surely ask her if she wants to fire a gun too, which, of course, she is always excited to do.