Ukraine’s ‘Bucha witches’ volunteer to shoot down Russian drones

Bucha, Ukraine – Valentyna beams when she talks about her new vocation – a “witch of Bucha”.

That’s the unofficial moniker of almost 100 women aged 19 to 64 who are volunteers in part-time military service in air defence units in the suburban community northwest of Kyiv.

Each “Bucha witch” trains to handle assault rifles and machineguns to shoot down Russian drones that swarm above their homes several times a month.

The weapons fly towards Kyiv to blow up buildings, prompting Ukrainian air defence forces to launch pricey Western-supplied missiles at them.

The buzzing swarms repeat the route of Russian ground forces in early 2022 when they occupied most of the Bucha district for 33 days and committed atrocities, now well documented, that captured the world’s attention.

According to Ukrainian officials and international war crimes monitors, Russian fighters killed hundreds of civilians and robbed, raped and tortured thousands more.

Decimated by the killings, migration and mobilisation, residents in Bucha described a community reeling from a collective post-traumatic stress disorder and itching for revenge.

Since April, dozens of women have signed up to become a “Bucha witch” to find solace and fulfilment.

“My mum is happy that I found myself. And I did find myself here. Found friends, colleagues, brothers and sisters,” Valentyna, a 51-year-old mother of three sons, told Al Jazeera.

She and her peers interviewed for this story withheld their last names and personal details in accordance with military regulations.

“We’re all kindred spirits. We have one heart for all. We have one purpose – to speed up the victory and invest in the victory any way we can,” Valentyna said earnestly.

Clad in camouflage with blonde hair spilling from under a baseball cap, she was holding an assault rifle and a flak jacket covered with dust, dry leaves and pine needles.

Valentyna and four other women spent several hours on a sunlit military range. They built dugouts and pits for their vehicles there.

These days, the women are bussed to the range to learn how to load arms, shoot and coordinate attacks in twos and threes.

The location is called “Mordor”, and Russian soldiers are routinely called “orcs” in Ukraine. Mordor is a realm in the fictional world of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth fantasy series while orcs are evil beings.

‘When you put on a uniform, you’re not a woman or a man. You’re a defender’

On a recent Saturday, the women and their instructors “stormed” a dugout covered with grey plastic and pine logs that smelled like a Christmas tree.

The male instructors acted unceremoniously, occasionally cursing and yelling things like “Move your a** from the tree!” or “I shot you. You’re f****** dead!”

Their commander is gender-blind.

“When you put on a uniform, you’re not a woman or a man. You’re a defender,” Andriy Verlaty, a raspy-voiced and burly colonel, told Al Jazeera.

“But there are women who can outdo any man in fulfilling military duties, in being responsible, pedantic.

“They even manage to wax their assault rifles,” he said like a stern parent admitting he’s proud of his child.

Two doors away from his office in a dusty storage room were the twisted pieces of one of their trophies – a shot-down Iranian-made Shahed drone.

Packed with 50kg (110lb) of explosives, the Shaheds and their modified Russian-made siblings, Gerans, move in raven-like flocks of dozens at 150 kilometres per hour (93 miles per hour).

Filling the air with the harrowing screech of their engines, they are easy to spot but hard to shoot down.

“Their tactics are always evolving,” Vladyslav Korg, who serves in a Bucha air defence unit, told Al Jazeera.

Each Russian drone has a GPS tracker and streams live video to its operator.

And when a Ukrainian air defence unit starts shooting, one of the drones, a bombless “spy”, flies up to it and turns on a projector so its operators can sic the swarm, Korg said.

Before joining air defence, each Bucha witch has to undergo weeks of training.

And it’s not a picnic.

“I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it,” Valentyna said. “But the body handles it. And when strength ends, spirit kicks in.”

She panted heavily while doing push-ups with a flak jacket on.

Next to her was a first-timer – Kateryna, who owns an art gallery in Kyiv.

“I was worried. I’ve never touched a gun before,” she said after the training. “But now, I’m beginning to understand things a little.”

The women joked that the drills were a “free outdoor gym”.

But they give them much more than workout endorphins.

‘Better to take part’

On the first day of Moscow’s full-scale invasion, another first-timer, Natalya, saw Russian soldiers spilling out of planes and helicopters at the Hostomel airport near Bucha.

Several panicked hours later, she fled with her daughters and nieces while her husband and son stayed on to serve in the military.

These days, she’s their peer.

“It’s better to take part than to watch from aside,” Natalya, a confectioner from 9 to 5, told Al Jazeera.

The training is also a form of collective psychotherapy.

Valentyna’s village next to Bucha has not been occupied, but her family survived near-death horrors.

One day, deafening shelling forced them into their ice-cold basement. The walls were shaking, and shards of stucco kept falling from the ceiling.

The shelling was so loud that she could not hear the words of her frightened child, who she hugged as he yelled into her ear.

When leaving westwards in a jam-packed car, Russian soldiers flagged it down and ordered the family to roll down the windows.

One of the soldiers touched her son’s head with his gun’s muzzle, she said.

“That was such a shock and such a fear, a starting point” that eventually led her to the group of female fighters, Valentyna said.

Russia withdrew from Bucha in late March 2022. Valentyna returned home to see that the three cats she had to leave behind had grouped together with seven more felines.

They shared all the food they could get equally without fighting or trying to dominate others.

“I felt the same unity with neighbours, with the community,” Valentyna said. “We became different. Everyone became different.”

She feels guilty when she sees Russia’s drones from her window.

“They are scary, very scary,” Valentyna said knowingly – her elder sons assemble and retrofit Ukrainian drones.

She gave up her job as a medical doctor to learn tactical combat casualty care.

Mentally, she never parts from her team.

“Because when you’re at home, the war’s not over, and you’re always here, here with your thoughts,” she said while a yellow school bus was taking her and four other women out of “Mordor”.