Sarah Ashton-Cirillo was a journalist when she began to cover the Armed Forces of Ukraine’s Kharkiv Defense Forces at the beginning of Russia’s war against the country.
She eventually enlisted, and a commander from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on Jan. 31 assigned her to the unit’s 209th Batallion of the 113th Brigade.
Ashton-Cirillo, a transgender woman who was born in Florida, was working as a senior combat medic in a trench near Kreminna, a Russian-occupied city in eastern Ukraine, on Feb.
23 when shrapnel from an enemy artillery shell wounded her. Ashton-Cirillo suffered injuries to her right hand and to her face, and her fellow soldiers had to wait seven hours to evacuate her.