Yulia Mykytenko leads a platoon of men in a reconnaissance and attack unit – and has already lost her husband, father and many friends in the devastating war. In her memoir, she writes that she was always destined for combat

The sound of birdsong is so loud outside Yulia Mykytenko’s current home, an abandoned house somewhere in the Donbas region of Ukraine, that I can hear it through my laptop. We’re speaking on Zoom, Mykytenko visible briefly – young, wearing black, her dark bobbed hair with blue-dyed streaks in it – before she turns the camera off because her signal isn’t great. She has some outside space and, she says with a laugh, a local sheep sometimes comes to visit her dog. Mykytenko, a lieutenant in the Ukrainian army, also feeds the street cats, pets abandoned by residents who fled, and has her own cat. In her new memoir, How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying (the name comes from the first line of a poem by the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus), she writes that each of the houses her 15-strong platoon live in has a cat, to catch the mice and rats that chew everything, including the cables to the generators and satellite communications. Their numbers boom in the area, she writes, as they “feed on the bodies of hapless soldiers”.

Mykytenko, 29, spent two years here between 2016 and 2018, when Russia invaded the region, then again after the full-scale invasion in 2022. One of the first female frontline commanders, she leads a reconnaissance and attack unit. Her pilots use drones to track the Russian army and to locate the dead bodies of fallen colleagues and support their retrieval. Just this morning, some of her men – she lives with five of her platoon – told her there had been some heavy shelling at 5am, but she slept through it. “I got used to it,” she says. This current house is “quite comfortable” – it has running water (at the previous one, they had to fetch water from a well), but it is cold and takes an hour to heat.