Russia’s full-scale invasion upended the life Mavka once knew. Determined to protect her home and family, she joined Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade, the Black Cossacks, despite repeated rejection, eventually helping maintain the communications networks linking soldiers and command structures near the front line. In the dimmer back room of a café in central Kharkiv, a Hollywood film flickers silently across the wall behind her. The projected light moves over cups, tables, faces, then disappears again into shadow. Outside, the city continues through another spring under war – restaurants open, traffic moving, civilians hurrying along sidewalks that have learned to absorb the sound of sirens into everyday life.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Sharpened by war Mavka sits calmly beneath the shifting light in a Ukrainian military uniform, her arms folded loosely across her chest. She laughs often during the conversation. Not nervously, nor in the forced way people sometimes laugh to escape difficult subjects, but openly and with surprising ease. Her dark hair falls over one shoulder, her uniform sits neatly, deliberately, and there is something striking about the contrast between the setting and the way she carries herself: composed, alert, entirely present. The war has not flattened her into abstraction or bitterness. If anything, it seems to have sharpened her sense of who she is. Mavka laughs during a portrait session in central Kharkiv. Despite years of war, moments of warmth and ease still break through during conversation. April 2026. (Photo by Korbinian Leo Kramer)