Mariia's working day starts at 4:30 a.m. A cook with the reconnaissance battalion of Ukraine's 40th Artillery Brigade, she has cooked for as many as 860 soldiers at once—borsch at military scale, and the steady work of keeping a brigade fed—Army Inform writes in a profile of her service.
Mariia's seven years in uniform put a human scale on a war that began in 2014: one working life spent feeding soldiers.
Mariia's path to that kitchen began long before the full-scale invasion. She wanted to enlist in 2014, when Russia's war in the Donbas started, and joined the army in 2019, she told Army Inform. Her first posting took her to Popasna, in the east, where she served for eight months. Russia's full-scale invasion, in February 2022, caught her unit in Kharkiv Oblast.
One moment from the first weeks of the invasion has stayed with her, she told Army Inform: in March 2022, an elderly couple who assumed the soldiers had nothing gave them what little they had themselves—ten eggs and four cigarettes. She has kept cooking in the years since.
