Name: Maiia Moskvych
Age: 28
Education: Lutsk National Technical University
Profession: Former volunteer fighter, entrepreneur
Did you know? In the early days of the 2013–2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, media outlets in the Lutsk Oblast dubbed Moskvych “Jeanne d’Arc of Volyn” when authorities placed her under home arrest for supporting protests.
Before Russia’s war hit Donbas in 2014, Maya Moskvych was a bookkeeper in Lutsk, the Volyn Oblast city of 200,000 residents located 400 kilometers west of Kyiv.
The war turned her life upside down. She became a volunteer fighter, drawing combat duties, then a disappointed veteran with health problems, and finally a triumphant gold medalist of the Invictus Games, the international sports competition for disabled veterans.
Her life started changing with the outbreak of the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014. She became an activist. When Russia invaded Crimea and Donbas in early 2014, Moskvych volunteered to fight.
Getting to the front lines wasn’t easy: the emerging volunteer fighting groups weren’t in a hurry to take a young woman aboard. Eventually, Moskvych succeeded: In August 2014, she went to the Donbas front with the General Kulchytskiy Battalion, part of Ukraine’s National Guard.
“In the war zone, my experience of a bookkeeper came in handy again,” Moskvych says. “When we were hunting smugglers in the no-man’s land, I was the only one in my combat formation to be good at documenting.”
However, she was always keen to join a force with a stronger nationalistic flavor. She first left for the Garpun Battalion, another volunteer group, but ended up spending two years with the Myrotvorets Battalion, subordinated to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.
She became the only woman in her combat formation. “Serving at such a pace, on equal footing with men, was really hard,” Moskvych says. “Living in the same barrack with boys was tough, too. You want to sleep, but they are rumbling around.”
Her health deteriorated: violent back pain tortured her amid jeopardizing backbone issues. Sad and frustrated, she left military service because of disability in December 2017.
After the war, started a business to grow and sell garlic. She also applied to participate in the Invictus Games 2018 tournament in Sydney, Australia. Moskvych started training her archery skills in March 2018, even though she had never held a bow in her hands before. She beat all expectations — on Oct. 26, she brought the Ukrainian team a gold medal in archery. She won another gold medal as part of the three-person archery team. She dedicated her victory to “all those who survived the Maidan and the war.”
