Alina Mykhaylova has been in the war since 2014. She’s a paramedic, volunteer, civic activist, deputy of the Kyiv City Council, and student of the UCU Master’s Program of the School of Public Administration. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, she’s been a coordinator in a medical unit and is involved with the evacuation of the wounded directly on the frontlines.
Mykhaylova admits that in this war she first felt real fear, which leads to numbness: “It’s terrible to die from a bullet, to be captured. It’s terrible simply because of the awareness that there are now no more safe corners in Ukraine. At any moment, a rocket from the Caspian Sea can take your life.”
“And this is decided not by fate, God, or time, but by the Russians, who are ALLOWED to do this. A L L O W E D. Allowed in the 21st century to unleash a third world war. To kill and torture children, to erase whole cities from the face of the earth, to terrorize with energy a whole country, to abuse captives and carry out the genocide of an entire nation.”
After a year of war, Mykhaylova is convinced that the biggest fight is still to come: “We still have to wage war on yet another front, the front of the increase in number of our parasites and true patriots.”