Maryna Mytsiuk spends her free time at a shooting range outside Kyiv, hyper-focused on hitting her targets. She's got to practice. She's waiting for a call that, any day, will send her to war.
"Of course, I'd like to be in a combat position," said Mytsiuk, a 27-year-old folklore scholar who speaks Japanese and works at a nonprofit. "With my build and height, I'm not a natural fit for that … so I'm training very hard."
She is among a growing number of Ukrainian women joining the military as Russia's full-scale war on the country nears its fourth year, and troops remain in short supply. This comes as an end to the fighting appears no closer than it was when President Trump took office in January vowing to quickly broker peace.
Mytsiuk said the Ukrainian military has become much more receptive to women since the early days of the full-scale invasion, when Ukrainian men were lining up at recruitment centers to become soldiers.
She wanted to sign up, too, but was told she would be best off in the kitchen, she said, "where I could make dumplings."
Mytsiuk, however, plowed ahead. She enrolled at a military university for a second degree, graduating this summer. She looked into several brigades and applied to those with special forces units. She had difficult conversations with her mother and her boyfriend, a soldier. Both strongly oppose her decision.
A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent briefly held at gunpoint a woman whom he claimed was following him, prompting a southern California police officer to intervene, authorities said.
The US navy has announced that the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the world’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, has entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.
Ethics officials at Fannie Mae were removed from their jobs as they investigated whether a top Trump ally improperly accessed mortgage documents of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and other Democratic officials, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
Cleto Escobedo III, the bandleader for the "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" in-house band Cleto and the Cletones, has died. He was 59.
The Supreme Court is staying out of the fight over funding food benefits for now as a deal in Congress to end the government shutdown appears likely to be approved.
Department of Justice officials said they’re launching civil rights and terrorism investigations into protests outside a Turning Point USA event on the University of California, Berkeley campus on Nov. 10, in another escalation by the Trump administration to combat what it views as left-leaning dissenters in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death.
More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war so far, Gaza health officials said Saturday, as both sides completed the latest exchange of bodies under the terms of the tenuous ceasefire.
