‘Oh my daughter’: Volunteer medic, 29, buried in Ukraine
VINNYTSIA, UKRAINE >> As the mother’s cries of anguish pierced the cold morning air, mourners who had fought back tears could hold them no longer.
“Oh Yana, oh my daughter,” Olena Rikhlitska howled. “My baby, my little one.”
Her only child, 29-yearold Yana Rikhlitska, lay in a coffin before her, the younger woman’s blonde hair still in the tight braids she adopted when she voluntarily joined the Ukrainian army as a medic late last year. Just over a week ago, Associated Press journalists filmed Yana Rikhlitska as she helped treat wounded soldiers in a field hospital outside Bakhmut, which Russian forces have pulverized during a three-sided assault to seize the city in eastern Ukraine.
A few days later she was dead. Rikhlitska and another medic were killed by shelling as they shuttled between the field hospital and the front line.
As friends, colleagues and relatives gathered Tuesday in her home city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine to bid her a final farewell, they remembered a person full of vitality and spurred by a life-long drive to help others.
“She was really friendly and kind,” said Viktor Fateyev, 39, a colleague from the IT company where she worked in the human resources department. “She was like a mother to everyone; she was the focus point everyone gathered around.”
Rikhlitska was in Brazil just before Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. She spent a few months in the South American country practicing capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art, Fateyev said, clutching a bunch of yellow tulips as he waited to pay his respects at the funeral. She flew home after the invasion, he said, and straight away began fundraising and working as a volunteer for troops to help the Ukrainian defense effort. It wasn’t long before she decided to become a front-line medic.
He spotted her in the AP video when it aired, Fateyev said, and posted it in a group chat of her co-workers. “Everyone was so excited,” he said. “And then, the next day...” he trailed off.