Name: Mariya Berlinska
Age: 29
Education: Master’s degree in history from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy
Profession: The Head of the Ukrainian Center for Aerial Reconnaissance, aviation explorer and army volunteer
Did you know? She says that when Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine ends, the next day she will buy a plane ticket to go and study abroad for a couple of years.
Mariya Berlinska knows that the army is not just for men. When Russia unleashed its war in eastern Ukraine, she switched from being a student, a future historian, into an army volunteer, a drone pilot and, recently, a movie producer.
Berlinska heads the Center for Aerial Reconnaissance, where service people can learn how to operate unmanned aerial vehicles. She raises money and supplies drones to the army. She is also producing a documentary about women serving in the Donbas.
In the summer of 2014, after the EuroMaidan Revolution removed President Viktor Yanukovych and Russia annexed Crimea, Berlinska stopped attending university and packed her bags to go to the war front. She was ready to perform any duty. There was a need for pilots of unmanned aerial vehicles, so she decided she had to become one.
She started reading about drones and took a pilot training course. Since then, she has been working with army battalions performing airborne reconnaissance.
Soon, Berlinska was ready to teach others, so she founded a school based at her alma mater, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, to provide soldiers with training in drone piloting.
In this fourth year of war, many volunteers have returned to civilian life due to the slow pace of fighting and exhaustion, but not Berlinska. She is still collecting money, buying drones and taking them to the east regularly. Her father also serves there.
“To put it simply: drones are eyes in a war, the ability to see,” she said.
Drones can be used to determine the direction of shelling, and provide warning of attacks to soldiers so that they can seek shelter. They help the military fight by using technology, instead of risking lives. But today the army is still short of even the simplest drones.
Berlinska has almost exhausted her emotional resources after three years. Like many, she was waiting for the state to step into the roles that the volunteers had been playing. But it didn’t happen.
“Ukraine is a country for people with very strong nerves,” she said. “Now the course of the war is being determined not in the trenches, but in offices, by men in expensive suits.”
Berlinska’s next project is the movie “Invisible Battalion,” a documentary that she is producing about women in the military. It’s the first time, Berlinska said, that women have told their stories. After showing the film on a Ukrainian TV channel, Berlinska plans to submit it for screening at international festivals. “I want to remind the world with this movie that we have an ongoing war,” she said.
