Savita Wagner actually never intended to pick up a weapon and fight. After stopping her medical studies, the woman from Bonn tutored students in mathematics, Latin and German, and also worked as a web designer. With her husband, a Canadian, who was a programmer, she went to Halle and re-enrolled there to study mathematics, she writes "Deutsche says” (DW).
Everything changed after she went to Ukraine in her own car in March 2022, driving humanitarian aid - to a country she knew only from the news. A month after Russia invaded Ukraine, Savita Wagner drove medicines and medical supplies from Lviv to Kyiv.
There she met Western journalists who were looking for a driver. She drove that group of journalists along mined roads to the villages around Kiev and Chernihiv, which the Ukrainians had just liberated from the Russian occupation. Residents accepted the reporter team as 'liberators'. If you gave them just one loaf of bread, they almost kissed your feet. "And then we discovered that the Russians were torturing people," Wagner told DW in the fall of 2022.
Because of what she experienced, she also became "aggressive": it was no longer enough for her to just help by delivering humanitarian aid. "To hell with just treating the symptoms, the cause should be removed," she thought at the time.
In the trenches near Izium
Savita Wagner had no military experience, and she didn't even know the Ukrainian language. After all, a few semesters of medical studies were "enough to help the wounded on the front line." Heavy fighting took place, medical personnel were badly needed.
After two months of basic training, in June 2022, the German was transferred to the front in the north-east of Ukraine - in the infantry. In the chaos of the first months of the war, her superiors on the spot, she assumed, did not know that she had studied medicine.
For weeks, Savita Bagner was in the trenches before she was assigned to the ambulance service. "We were on the front line 24 hours a day." You are in the forest, in the middle of nowhere. You don't have binoculars for night vision, only one for every five or eight people. A shot is heard somewhere, then you also shoot in the direction of the Russians".
Their base was within range of Russian mortars and tanks.
"In any other army it would be dislocated, but the Ukrainians are tough guys, seriously," she said.
There was no drinking water and no proper toilets.
"I showered in the rain, I would always be grateful if it rained." You're constantly sweating or freezing - somehow there's nothing in between. In such conditions, at some point you notice that it eats away at you," Wagner described.
Mykola Berdnyk/DWA soldier holds a picture of Savita Wagner during her funeral in Kyiv
She wasn't the "war type"
These were rough experiences for someone who grew up in well-to-do circumstances in Bonn. Her mother was a clerk, her father a policeman.
"I've never seen war movies, I've never been a war type," Savita Wagner told DW.
German names for ordinary military terms such as mortar, platoon or trench did not even occur to her. She only learned war vocabulary in her unit in Ukraine where there were many foreigners. They spoke to each other in English.
It angered her that most of the volunteers in Ukraine were from the US, not Europe.
"It is extremely unbelievable that Putin will drop an atomic bomb on America." But, if Ukraine were to lose this war, Putin would not stop - the whole of Europe would have a big problem," she believed.
Foreigners in the nationalist volunteer battalion
The "Karpatska Sich" battalion, in which Savita Wagner served, was founded as a volunteer unit and was only later integrated into the regular Ukrainian army. For foreigners, who often neither knew Ukrainian nor had combat experience, that unit was initially more open than others.
At the same time, "Karpatska sich" has a reputation for being strictly nationalistic. Savita Wagner did not feel it at all. She said that she only met "ordinary Ukrainians" there - a musician from Donetsk, a textile entrepreneur: "It's not an extremist association."
Savita Wagner described herself as non-political: "I am not a supporter of any party. I'm somewhere in the middle - neither left nor right".
Final resting place in Kiev
Savita Wagner was killed on January 30 in an artillery attack near Svatova in eastern Ukraine - while trying to evacuate wounded soldiers from Colombia. While she was at the front, she saved dozens of wounded, her colleagues say.
In February, Savita Wagner was buried in Kyiv with military honors - in the so-called "Alley of Fame" at the military cemetery.
"We felt it was right to leave her with her colleagues." She was burning for that thing. She was so strongly involved that she left her life there. We will travel to Kiev once a year to visit her," her mother Ula Wagner told DW.
Karl S, Savita Wagner's husband, talks about the couple's plans to live a little in Germany and a little in Ukraine after the war.
"You know, Ukrainians are so kind. On the one hand, I wanted him to come back. On the other hand, she was doing something she firmly believed in - she was fighting for the freedom of Europe, not only Ukraine. "She sacrificed her life for freedom - which is often taken for granted in the West," Savita's husband Wagner concluded.
