Wagner's mercenaries hit the medical car that had just evacuated wounded Ukrainian soldiers in Bakhmut's meat grinder, the mortar rounds took away two paramedical volunteers: one was Yana Rykhlitska, 29, better known at the front as ' the angel of fighters', so renamed by the military units of Kiev for the grace of his appearance and fortitude.
Yana was a petite girl with blond pigtails, green eyes who nonetheless looked at the world "with optimism, whatever the hell is going on, a laugh, courage and professionalism," as she herself wrote in a Facebook post two months does.
Now Ukraine has another hero to mourn, on the day President Volodymyr Zelensky celebrated March 8 by declaring his gratitude "to all the women who work, teach, study, save, heal, fight for the country" .
Yana was buried on Tuesday in the Alley of Heroes in her hometown of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine.
There were hundreds of people at her funeral.
“Desperate, small and thin, she carried everything on her shoulders,” described her relative Natalya Vlasyuk.
Tetiana Zenart, her best friend, had heard her on the phone on March 3, a few hours before she died instantly under mortar shelling: "I asked her how things were going there in Bakhmut, with that unimaginable flow of wounded She replied in her usual tone, 'I'm enjoying myself, still in one piece'".
Before everything ended as it ends in war, when Yana could still run to recover the wounded soldiers, Tetiana had written all her admiration and her affection on her social networks: "When the
Ukraine will win, remember that half of the work was done by her.
That's right.
I don't know a military unit that isn't grateful to her."
Until February 24 last year, before the war broke out, Yana used her diploma to work in an insurance company.
With the invasion everything changed.
She first volunteered to help civilians and military, then she decided to attend paramedic courses and signed a contract with the Ukrainian Armed Forces by joining the 93rd Kholodnyi Yar Brigade as a rescuer.
"Now is a dark time for all the war doctors and soldiers she helped. We will take revenge. Calmly, but with cold anger, we are doing our job," wrote volunteer Valerii Bahynskyi on the same social networks where Yana posted the photos with the wounded, his thoughts, the images of a scared little dog saved from the explosions.
Her Facebook profile is still open, inevitably heartbreaking with those images of a strong and fragile young woman forever lost in Bakhmut's carnage.
Yana would have turned 30 on April 2.
Her parents have refused to raise funds for the family: "Donate to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, that's what our daughter would have wanted."