Shelly Sanders Bestselling Author of Historical Fiction

With the intersection of Women’s History Month and the US government’s shocking decision to stop funding Ukraine’s war efforts against Russia, it’s time we remember legendary WWII female Ukrainian sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, and celebrate today’s female snipers fighting for Ukraine.

I came across Lyudmila while researching female snipers for my upcoming novel, The Night Sparrow; immediately, I was struck by her impressive tally of 309 kills, and by the enormous impact she’s had globally! Young women idolized ‘Lady Death’(her moniker during the war), keeping newspaper articles and photos that reflected her ingenuity and courage at the front. Now, 80 years later, as history chillingly repeats itself, as Ukraine fights for the country Lyudmila once defended, modern female snipers reflect Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s valor and commitment to ending fascism.

Lyudmila, a 24 year-old divorced mother with one son, was determined to join the Red Army’s infantry when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. She left Kiev University, where she was studying history, with an eye to becoming a teacher, and enlisted. Since she’d already earned a sharpshooter badge and a marksmanship certificate as a teenager, she was sent to the front and quickly logged 187 kills at the Siege of Odessa.

During the Great Patriotic War, as WWII was known in the Soviet Union, 800,000 women served in the Soviet Armed Forces, and 2,000 of these were snipers. Just 500 female snipers survived. The Soviet Union was the only country with women in combat.

Lyudmila didn’t mince words about her motives in, Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper: “Some became depressed, some lost faith in victory and dreaded the future. But I thought of vengeance, inescapable and irresistible.”

Still, she had trouble coping before “an attack,” she writes in her memoir, “you never feel particularly well. There is a sort of vacuum in your head; your mood deteriorates. It is an oppressive and unpleasant situation.”

When she was promoted to lieutenant in May, 1942, because of her recorded 257 kills, Lyudmila’s acceptance speech was short and to the point, “I’ll get more.”

In a 2023 International Women’s Day article for the Institute of War & Peace Reporting, Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksii Reznikov said that 5,000 women are “directly involved in hostilities.” Like Ukrainian single mother and sniper, code-named, Chili. In a January 2025 interview with the UK edition of The Sun, Chili admits she couldn’t sleep the night before her first mission. “It is impossible to prepare ­emotionally for this, but in the end it was cool, except that everything and everyone wants to kill you.” Chili knew she was meant to be a sniper when she discovered she could stay calm and shoot even when the enemy fired at her. Today, she says she has no qualms about killing Russians, but isn’t sure she’ll be able to “ever return to her old life after the war.”

“I see the occupier who came to our land to destroy our own people, nothing more,” says Oleksandra, a baker who enlisted as a sniper after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In an interview with Max Zander, a reporter with DW News, she explains that “Every woman in the army has to show she is worthy to be in the same combat position and fight on equal footing with men.”

Another revered Ukrainian sniper, known only as ‘Charcoal’, has fought Kremlin-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region, and she remains in combat as a sniper today. Charcoal camouflages her rifle in netting, just as Lyudmila did, and she’s known as a “hero of the modern war,” in Ukraine, which mirrors Lyudmila’s award, Hero of the Soviet Union.

Yevhenia ‘Emerald’, a jeweller who became sniper after Russia’s invasion, has been coined Ukraine’s Joan of Arc. Striking with long, mahogany hair, Emerald credits her father for her shooting expertise in a Scripps News segment, ‘Ukraine’s Unsung Heroes: Stories from the Front Line of the Ukraine’— “I’ve been shooting since I was a child. I was my daddy’s girl. He taught me.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

The thread connecting these female snipers is their determination to risk everything and fight to the end. Lyudmila, during one of her four hospital stays to recover from injuries, wrote to her older sister, “I leave in two days and go back to my unit, where my special role is as a soldier-sniper. Unless I’m killed, I plan to make it to Berlin, give the Germans a thrashing, and return to Kiev.” To her bitter disappointment, she ended the war as an instructor and, like thousands of soldiers, struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol for the rest of her life. She was 58 years old.

In April, 2022, Charcoal said this to the New York Post: “I know that I can die. I’ve thought about all these moments…We will definitely win. Personally, I will stand to the last!” For Chili, the ‘hardest part is knowing her 10-year-old son is “waiting for me at home,” she said in her interview with The Sun. “I explain the situation, that it is ­necessary, that I must be here. But he is a child. He wants a mother.”

Emerald met and married her husband on the frontline, but this didn’t keep her from continuing in her role as sniper. When she discovered she was pregnant, she kept the news from her husband and continued fighting for the first two months of her pregnancy. Filled with guilt for not being able to stay on the front until the war ended, Emerald left the infantry and had her baby. She has not returned to the front and her marriage has ended, but she continues to increase the awareness of Ukraine’s fight for freedom through social media: “I fight injustice, help people, cover important topics in Ukraine,” she said to the Institute for War & Peace Reporting.

Lyudmila’s reputation flourished during a goodwill/propaganda tour to the US and Canada in 1942. While reporters seemed more interested in the length of her skirt, her weight, and her lack of makeup, than her feats as a sniper, singer Woody Guthrie immortalizes her achievements in ‘Miss Pavlichenko’, writing:

In your mountains and canyons quiet as the deer

Down in your big trees knowing no fear

You lift up your sight. And down comes a hun

And more than three hundred nazidogs fell by your gun