Yaryna Chornoguz, writer and military servicemember, during an interview in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 14, 2024. (Viacheslav Ratynskyi / The Kyiv Independent)
Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in The Kyiv Independent’s first-ever print edition, titled “The Power Within.” You can order a copy in our e-store.
If there were four women named Yaryna Chornohuz, they would all be 30 years old, all born in Kyiv, yet each would follow a different path.
One of them would be a combat medic on the front line, risking her life to liberate Ukraine from Russian aggression.
Another would write poetry, weaving the beauty of the Ukrainian language into captivating verses.
The third would be a mother to a beautiful girl, and the fourth would be a civic activist tirelessly rallying for a better Ukraine.
But there is only one Yaryna Chornohuz — and she is all of them and much more.
As a combat medic in the 140th Separate Reconnaissance Battalion of the Ukrainian Marine Corps, Chornohuz, who goes by her callsign “Yara,” has endured numerous fierce battles, helping to save the lives of her fellow soldiers and civilians caught in front-line zones.
Beyond the battlefield, Chornohuz is a celebrated author. With her words, she gives voice to the pain and hopes for her country’s future. She also breaks stereotypes about women in the army, standing strong shoulder to shoulder with her male brothers in arms for nearly four years.
“In every woman, there is a soldier, destined to face the darkness alone,” Chornohuz writes in one of her poems.
Her fight
“The front devours my heart and my comrades.
It consumes all my words.”
It started with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech.
“That day, our commander was watching it, and when Putin finally finished his pathos-laden address, the commander said: ‘Something is about to happen now’,” Chornohuz recalls the morning of Feb. 24, 2022.
At that time, her unit was stationed near Siverskodonetsk, in Luhansk Oblast. “Immediately, from across the river, they (Russian troops) started shelling us with Grad rocket launchers. We hadn’t heard any Grads since 2017.”
It was after joining the military in 2020, that Chornohuz started to believe that Russia would eventually invade. To prepare for the worst, she decided to undergo challenging military training as part of the Marine Corps.
But the intensity of the fighting that began when Russia launched its full-scale invasion was unlike anything they could have imagined, even for experienced soldiers, she says.
“We were never prepared to face an enemy force four times larger than ours. We were always trained with the expectation that we’d be fighting with roughly equal forces,” she says.
Their first “big battle” with Russian troops Chornohuz took part in was in early March 2022 as Russian forces attempted to seize the village of Zachativka in Donetsk Oblast.
There, Chornohuz faced one of the “most difficult” experiences as a combat medic as she tried to save the life of a 10-year-old boy hiding from Russian attacks in a basement. She recalls the boy “becoming pale and almost dying” before her eyes.
“He had shrapnel in his chest,” Chornohuz recalls. “His skin around the wound began to close up fast, and it took us a while to figure out where the wound had come from,” she says, adding a short but crucial line, “He survived.”
Chornohuz took part in several extremely high-risk operations. She was among those defending the Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway — a critical supply route for Ukrainian forces.
“Losses, injuries, and especially the deaths of those you’ve served and fought alongside for a long time — these are things no one can ever truly be prepared for.”
Yaryna Chornoguz, military servicemember and a poet, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Nov. 14, 2024. (Viacheslav Ratynskyi / The Kyiv Independent)
She also crossed the Siverskyi Donets River to help liberate the Serebrianskyi Forest, a strategic area heavily fought over by Russian troops, and was part of one of the first units to enter the newly liberated town of Yampil in Donetsk Oblast.
The risky Ukrainian operation near Krynky, a village on the occupied eastern bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast, was also on her list. As a combat medic, Chornohuz didn’t cross the river herself; instead, she treated those returning from highly dangerous missions.
“I was in the village opposite to Krynky, where we treated the wounded; we were stationed in a house without a basement with glide bombs hitting nearby,” she recalls. “But we sat there because someone had to receive (the injured) and evacuate them to the hospital.”
Ukrainian marines first crossed the river and gained a foothold on the Russian-occupied side in October 2023, with fierce fighting for the village lasting for months. The operation, however, didn’t yield territorial gains and placed a heavy strain on Ukrainian forces since, due to the nature of the fighting in Krynky, it was tough to retrieve soldiers who were injured and the bodies of those killed.
Chornohuz refrained from sharing further details of the operation, adding that “there were times when, for as long as seven days, we couldn’t bring the group back from the other side.”
As she describes her experience on the battlefield, Chornohuz often shifts the focus from herself to her fellow soldiers, describing them as driven and courageous fighters. Sorrow fills her eyes and resonates in her voice when she speaks of those who have been killed.
“Losses, injuries, and especially the deaths of those you’ve served and fought alongside for a long time — these are things no one can ever truly be prepared for.”
“They say the dead are mourned after the war is over, but our war will end with the lives of us all,” Chornohuz writes in her poem titled “Left Behind in Occupation.”
Her activism
“Voice, do not fall silent.
My people, come on,
start speaking.”
For Chornohuz, the fight to preserve Ukrainian identity began well before the full-scale war.
She spoke Ukrainian from an early age, growing up in a family of Ukrainian writers and bandura players — a traditional Ukrainian musical instrument. Despite a predominantly Russian-speaking environment shaped by centuries of Russian influence in Ukraine, she and her family’s stance on their native language and culture remained unwavering.
“I constantly had to answer the question, ‘Why do you speak Ukrainian?’ — both from children and adults,” Chornohuz recalls her school years in Kyiv in the early 2000s.
“Growing up in the Ukrainian discourse and culture, I saw how it was something targeted for destruction.”
Fighting for it was not optional for Chornohuz. It was a must. Despite being pregnant, she actively participated in the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution — one of the most pivotal events in Ukraine’s modern history — standing strong in Kyiv’s downtown even when the riot police, Berkut, violently beat and shot protestors.
The EuroMaidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, was a wave of mass protests and civil unrest in Ukraine from November 21, 2013, to February 22, 2014. (Getty Images / The Kyiv Independent)
“The first lesson (of the revolution) is that you should never underestimate the Ukrainian people,” Chornohuz recalls. “The second was faith,” she adds.
“Even when the circumstances are completely against you, faith remains the key element that can change everything.”
That same faith helped her overcome the challenges and tragedies that followed.
Though the birth of her baby daughter, Orysia, kept Chornohuz from joining the Armed Forces in 2014, when Russia initially invaded Ukraine, she joined the fight five years later. Chornohuz joined Hospitallers, a volunteer medical battalion, and embarked on her first deployment in eastern Ukraine as a volunteer.
But it was one death — the kind of loss that shatters everything inside — that pushed Chornohuz to sign a contract with the military.
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Her loss
“I’ve experienced with you
the only true wedding — a funeral.”
Somewhere in the trenches of the war-torn Donetsk Oblast, Chornohuz met and fell in love with a young Ukrainian soldier, Mykola Sorochuk, who went by the callsign “Krasnyi.”
Although their time together was brief, their relationship made a lasting impact on her life.
She speaks about him with a voice that carries grief, pain, and love.
“He would say: ‘It’s better for a son to visit his father’s grave after we’ve reclaimed all our territories than to visit his father in a psychiatric ward, where he’d end up after enduring a drawn-out war of attrition,’ like the one we had then,” referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s east with the use of proxy forces in 2014.
While Ukraine made many attempts to negotiate ceasefires with Russia, with President Volodymyr Zelensky intensifying these efforts after taking office in 2019, Kremlin-backed forces repeatedly violated these agreements between 2014 and February 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
Amid one of those “ceasefires,” a sniper shot and killed Sorochuk in Donetsk Oblast. He was only 22 years old, preparing to go on short leave to see Chornohuz.
Mykola Sorochuk and Yaryna Chornoguz in an undated photo. Mykola was killed by a Russian sniper near Talakivka, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, on Jan. 22, 2020. (Yaryna Chornoguz / Facebook)
“His death was a devastating blow for me. I came to terms with the harsh truth: We are at war, and our best people are being killed. Yet everyone remains silent,” Chornohuz says.
The pain she felt with his sudden death prompted her to organize a three-month-long rally near the President’s Office in Kyiv, named the “Spring on Granite.” She calls it a “requiem-protest,” a “memorial for the unnoticed losses,” and her “desperate plea to change the policy of neglect toward the war.”
At the time, many in Ukraine and abroad overlooked the war in the east, treating it as a distant conflict rather than the first stage of a much larger catastrophe.
“I understood that Russia would take advantage of this, that they had conditioned us to this rhythm — that the best of us were sitting in the trenches, being killed, but no one sees it.”
All that pain and frustration was transformed into her military service. But it also echoed in her poetry.
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Her words
“If you and I remain alive”
Chornohuz devoted her first collection of poems published in 2020, “How the War Circle Bends,” to Sorochuk.
She wrote it when she was only stepping on her military path, “exploring a more humanitarian, symbolic, and historical spectrum.”
Through her painfully honest verses, Chornohuz makes her readers feel her grief, as well as her love.
“All my actions are an address to you.
I carry you within me.
I catch your voice in the voices
of distant relatives.
You survived the last autumn
and the middle of winter,
at the zero line.”
Her second publication, the 2023 collection “Dasein: The Defense of Presence,” features powerful front-line poetry that “reflects on the problems you encounter on the front lines or the truths you encounter there.”
It was devoted to her grandfather, Ukrainian writer Oleh Chornohuz, as well as Ukraine’s fallen soldiers.
Chornohuz calls it a “poetic diary” of her experiences during the full-scale war. She recalls occasionally drafting some thoughts while in the trenches and finishing them as complete verses upon returning from combat missions.
“I often recall a poem, ‘Those who are destined to die in battle,'” she says. “There is a line that I wrote, ‘The eyes of those who are destined to die in battle are always clearer than others.'”
“This is the line I constantly think of when I hear about wartime losses or of my fellow soldiers who have been killed.”
Yaryna Chornoguz, writer and military servicemember, during a performance in the basement of the Drama Theatre of Kherson, Ukraine, on Nov. 7, 2023. (Viacheslav Ratynskyi / The Kyiv Independent)
With her words, Chornohuz also helps civilians see and understand the war from the soldier’s perspective.
“War creates a deep divide between civilians and soldiers, and poetry, as a genre, has become very unifying. It builds bridges between different experiences and creates a space for trust,” she says.
In March, Chornohuz was awarded the Taras Shevchenko National Prize for her latest book. She also has two military awards, a medal for “Military Service” and one for “For Saving Lives.”
Chornohuz says it might take a while for Ukraine to win, reclaiming its full territories within the borders of 1991.
Until then, she is ready to continue her fight “as long as it takes.”
“In every woman, there is a soldier…” she writes.
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