УКР Before the full-scale invasion, Nataliya Artseva taught English, led fitness classes, raised three children, and ran a small handmade toy shop on Etsy. She is 43 years old and now serves as a senior field medic in the “Black Swarm” unit of the Ivan Bohun Territorial Defense Brigade. She knows how to stop bleeding, bathe with just one bucket of water, and make any shelter feel like home. Her callsign is “Ruda.” The junior sergeant talks about the army, family, and the people and animals she has saved in the war.
"Mom, I always knew you would go. It was only a question of 'when'."
“I’ve long been plagued by guilt. I’m from Luhansk, though I left before 2014. But you can’t just sit in safety and watch others fight for your land,” Nataliya explains, describing one of her motives for joining the military. The decision developed slowly over time. After 2022, she began actively volunteering, paying her own way to take courses in first aid and controlling massive bleeding, and helped teach mobilized soldiers the basics of tactical medicine. She recalls that at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, medical supplies were very poor. Quality tourniquets were critically lacking, and soldiers were given moldy first-aid packs dating from the Soviet era.
Thanks to her volunteering, Nataliya communicated a lot with soldiers and thought about joining the army from the start. “But people discouraged me. They said I was more needed in the rear, that I had children. And there were personal financial issues I had to resolve. So the idea of mobilization matured slowly,” she remembers.
At one point, she and her husband sat on their balcony and decided that their family needed to act. By that time, they had long lived in Lviv and had a stable life, but concluded that she was the best fit for the army. “I had been working on training grounds since 2022, I felt this was my path. And my youngest son, 10, is very 'daddy-oriented,' and the first thing he asked when I went to the army was, ‘Will dad be home?’ They have their own world: they watch anime together, ride bikes. So in our case, we decided it was better if I went to the army,” Nataliya recalls.
She told her children about her decision while on vacation in the Carpathians. Her middle daughter, 14, immediately said, “I always knew you would go. It was only a question of 'when'.” Her son was initially worried but calmed down when he learned that his mother would visit and call often. “My eldest said she couldn’t do it, that she’s afraid of blood, but also admitted it was my path. She’s already grown — a 20-year-old who recently attended her first protest,” their mother recounts.
After over a year of Nataliya’s service, the family has adapted to the changes. Her son calls whenever he wants to share something important. “Yes, it’s harder without mom. But now this is a war for survival. We all have to make sacrifices,” she says.
"I won’t take it! You’ll be bothering me here!"
Mobilization wasn’t easy. Many commanders didn’t want a woman in the unit. “Yes, in some units there is prejudice against women. One told me: ‘You’ll be bothering me here, this won’t please you, that won’t please you,’” Nataliya recalls. She moved through several units and eventually found her second “family” in the 1st Ivan Bohun Brigade.
She agrees that the army still needs to learn how to work with women. But women can strengthen any unit or branch of the military. Many of the soldiers she works with are very effective, sometimes even more so than men. “In my unit, there are two young women, 18 and 22. Joining the army was their conscious choice, and they’re comfortable to work with,” the medic says.
Nataliya believes men and women each have their strengths. According to her, women often have stronger empathy, making them well-suited for medic and psychologist roles. But in modern warfare, combat roles are also suitable for women. “My girls ‘fly’ drones like Valkyries,” she says.
She often hears advice to become “tougher” or develop a “command voice,” but she doesn’t plan to follow it. Her empathy is her strength. “I’m not here for people to fear me. I’m here to help. Sometimes people say, ‘He’s always in pain!’ That means I need to figure out what hurts and why,” she explains.
Nataliya was offered the medic role by acquaintances. A woman who served and lived in the neighboring yard saw her resume and called, saying they urgently needed a medic in a newly forming unit. Nataliya initially protested that she had no medical education, but was reassured that she would have time to learn. And she did: first basic combat training, then training in Norway.
Foreigners don’t realize how insane the Russian army is
The training in Norway was a bright stage in her service. It lasted 30 days. “We stopped bleeding on real pig thighs, stitched wounds on pig hearts. The most interesting part was a course on overcoming acute combat stress. Afterwards, we went through an obstacle course where actors simulated hysteria or freezing in near-combat conditions. You had to apply knowledge in practice,” Nataliya recalls.
However, there were things that revealed foreigners’ misunderstanding of how different our war is from the conflicts on which international protocols are based. “They told us about evacuating a wounded soldier within the so-called ‘golden hour,’ or evacuation by helicopter. In our war, that was practically impossible. They also said medic tents should be marked with a white cross so they wouldn’t be hit. I didn’t know how to explain how a painted cross actually increases the chance of being hit,” she says.
Among the instructors, though, were those with experience in Eastern Ukraine. “There was a Norwegian medic who worked with our medics in Bakhmut for eight months and even performed field surgery at his own risk. He was almost the only one who understood that the rules of the Russia-Ukraine war are different,” the medic says.
Nataliya goes to all training sessions with her soldiers, constantly teaching them how to apply tourniquets, tamponade, bandages, and more. She says it’s like shooting: if you don’t practice constantly, tactical medicine is useless. “It’s also very important to train people not in ideal conditions. One thing to apply a tourniquet in a gym, another to do it in the mud, in body armor, with frozen hands. That’s what needs to be practiced,” she stresses. She has long worked with Leleka Foundation’s medical backpacks and drag stretchers, a charity she learned about from a fellow combat medic.
“Nataliya, I trust you”
Her first shrapnel extraction was from a comrade during training: a fragment ricocheted into his hand on the range. “A medic serving with me used to give soldiers a shovel for every complaint, saying, ‘Go dig yourself in.’ So the guy with the fragment said, ‘I won’t go to her, Nataliya, I trust you.’ While he cleaned his weapon, I removed the fragment using manicure scissors and tweezers. Luckily, we had a soldier obsessed with sterility who even had a sterilizer for manicure tools,” she recalls.
The most important lesson Nataliya has learned in the army is tolerating uncertainty: you never know how long you’ll stay in a village or a building — a week, a month, six months. “Anyone wanting to join the army should also learn not to get attached to things. They get destroyed in no time.”
Instead, you attach to living beings. For example, her unit now has a real Bambi — a fawn whose mother stepped on a mine in Chernihiv Oblast. The child befriended a cat and a dog, also fed by the soldiers: “We built him an enclosure and feed him milk. Now he has a bearded adoptive mother, Vitya.” Nataliya also brings a yoga mat and arranges fitness sessions in new “gyms” across Kramatorsk, Sumy, and Chernihiv regions.