The Passion of Pain

By Tamara

The snow had not yet melted in the trenches east of Chasiv Yar. The ground was a mire of thawed ice and frozen clay, sodden with the blood of too many springs. Sergeant Olena Mykolaychuk stood waist-deep in it, her boots buried, her fingers stiff, and her rifle cradled as though it were an extension of her ribs. The wind came down from Bakhmut and scraped her skin like wire. But she had long stopped feeling the cold.

Pain had become her metronome.

She had once been a schoolteacher in Dnipro, a lover of Ukrainian literature and the violin. She had soft fingers then, and a voice that carried in classrooms. That voice had shouted down rowdy boys and recited Shevchenko’s verses with trembling joy.

That voice had screamed the day the invasion began, when her brother was drafted and her mother fainted by the window.

But now her voice was silent. On the front, sound betrayed. Speech became a whisper, screams were muffled into rags, and the only truth was written in the tremor of limbs and the agony behind eyes.

Olena had not set out to fight. She had joined a field hospital in 2022, driving an ambulance through burning towns to collect broken men. She had learned to pack wounds with torn bandages and say little while doing it. But after six months of ferrying the dead and the near-dead, something broke open in her. A grief so vast she could no longer bear to witness without striking back. She put down her stethoscope and picked up a rifle.

On a frostbitten morning in March, her leg was torn open by shrapnel from a Russian mortar. She dragged herself back to the trench, clutching her wound, her blood mixing with the ice. A fellow soldier called for evacuation, but she refused.

“I’ll fight on one leg if I must,” she told them.

They sewed her flesh with fishing line. No anaesthetic. She bit down on a rag soaked with whisky. And from that moment, pain became her creed.

For Olena, pain was more than punishment. It was proof that she still belonged to the living. It was the echo of conscience in a world that had forgotten its own. She carried her suffering like an icon, not in silence, but in defiance.

She did not cry when her closest comrade, Svitlana, bled out beside her. She pressed her friend’s hand to her own heart and whispered a lullaby they had both known as girls. It was the same lullaby she had sung to her nephew once, before his school was hit by an Iranian drone.

In that moment, she realised that pain, if borne fiercely enough, could become love.

Her body was riddled with scars. She had learned to walk again on crutches fashioned from birch poles. She had learned to shoot left-handed after nerve damage turned her dominant hand to tremble. She bore it all not out of vengeance, but devotion—to the land, to the language, to the faces of those who could not carry their own grief.

In the village of Ivanivske, when her unit reclaimed a burnt-out barn, they found a girl no older than seven hiding under a pile of hay. Mute. Wild-eyed. Olena sat beside her for hours, saying nothing, until the child leaned against her and slept. That night, Olena cried for the first time in a year.

The next morning, she rose with new strength. Her suffering was not hers alone. It was communal. It had been passed from mother to daughter, from soldier to civilian, from soil to soul. And it was sacred.

Some nights she dreams of the river near her childhood home, running clear and cold through the reeds. She dreams of her violin. Of blue skies without drones. Of her mother’s arms and the perfume of lilac in spring. Then she wakes in the mud, heartbeat roaring, the smell of gunpowder in her nostrils.

But she is not broken.

She is still on her feet.

And in every ragged breath, in every fire-lit scream across the steppe, Olena knows that pain—terrible, holy pain—is the last honest thing left in a war where nothing else can be trusted.

It is her passion.

And she carries it like a flag.