From February to May 2022, Yulia Goroshanska was among the several thousand fighters who defended Mariupol, Ukraine, in one of the war’s deadliest battles. But Russian forces outnumbered the defenders and strangled the seaside city, cutting off food, water and medical aid while arbitrarily executing civilians.

Late one night that April, Goroshanska’s barracks collapsed in an airstrike that killed almost everyone around her. Soon after, the 33-year-old mother was captured and taken to Olenivka, a Russian-run prison in occupied Ukraine that independent observers have described as a site of torture, starvation and abuse.

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Goroshanska spent months in captivity before her release in a prisoner exchange. Today, she is rebuilding her life while helping others heal from trauma. She spoke to Katharine Lake Berz in the leadup to the siege’s fourth anniversary.

KATHARINE LAKE BERZ: Very few women were in the Ukrainian army when you joined in 2014. What made you decide to enlist?

YULIA GOROSHANSKA: It’s hard to remember exactly how it all began. I watched the Maidan uprising on television in 2013, when Ukrainians took to the streets to defend their democratic future, and then the occupation of the Donetsk region. When the Russians approached Mariupol and the first explosions began back in 2014, I realized I couldn’t just hide in the basement. Mariupol was my hometown. I wanted to live there. I wanted to live in a democratic Ukraine. So I volunteered with the Mariupol defence unit.

KLB: How would you describe life under siege in Mariupol in 2022?

YG: It was hell. There’s no other word for it. I’ve seen many war movies, but nothing in them comes close to what I saw.

I watched the neighbourhood where I had lived all my life destroyed before my eyes. The school and the kindergarten my daughter and I had attended burned down. Worst of all were the bodies of my neighbours lying in the street — people I had spoken to only days earlier. No one could bury them; the shelling never stopped. Many people were killed by shells, and many more were engulfed in........

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