Journalist Olena Bilozerska has enrolled in the volunteer corps of the Right Sector to fight against Russian invaders in Ukraine. She presents her documentary film about women and girls enrolled as volunteers in the corps of the Right Sector. They are fighters and combat medics, volunteers helping injured soldiers in the hospitals, wives and girlfriends waiting for their husbands from combat duties and supporting them.
Short stories will not tell everything that needs to be told. There is 19-year-old Yana that is in charge of a medical brigade of around 10 men. She risks her life every time she goes into the very hell, under gunfire and mortar shellings. Her car has already been struck by a mine, and the number of wounded soldiers she has saved now number several dozens. A teacher from Poltava with a callsign Altair, a mother of three children, has come to the corps together with her husband. He is a scout, she is a sniper, teaches the younglings to shoot. Edelweiss is also a wife of a scout, she paints “artistic camouflage” on the boy’s weapons.
The Right Sector set up the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps, headed by Andrei Stempitsky, in July but it has not yet been legalized as an official unit within the armed forces. All the interviewed women are united in requesting for this recognition, which would give the volunteers official status of participants in the ATO and grant them the right to receive heavy weapons. The Right Sector is in talks on formalizing the corps’ status as a unit subordinate to the Defense Ministry but the negotiations are proceeding slowly, according to Right Sector spokesperson Artyom Skoropadsky.
Read more about Olena Bilozerska’s frontline experiences:
Olena Bilozerska: At a checkpoint in eastern Ukraine
Post-Battle War Journal of Olena Bilozerska. Part 1
Post-Battle War Journal of Olena Bilozerska. Part 2
Olena Bilozerska’s war diary: How one Ukrainian town welcomed us
