Natasha, you got it! The former kindergarten teacher who downed a Russian missile

In Ukraine, it isn’t just professional soldiers who are standing up to the enemy. They have been joined by countless civilians who have donned military uniform: drivers and doctors, managers and engineers, accountants and construction workers...

This is brought home when you hear the story of Nataliia Hrabarchuk, a former kindergarten teacher who shot down a Russian missile.

On 17 November 2024, Russia conducted yet another large-scale air attack on Ukraine, deploying 90 drones and 120 missiles of various types: Zircons, Iskanders, Kinzhals... Ukraine’s air defence forces – anti-aircraft missile troops, F-16, Su and MiG pilots, mobile fire groups and electronic warfare units – managed to destroy 140 aerial targets that day.

One of those targets, a Kh-101 cruise missile, was shot down by Nataliia Hrabarchuk, an anti-aircraft gunner in the missile unit of the 1st Halychyna and Volhynia Radio Technical Brigade of Air Command Zakhid (West). You may have already seen the video of her perfect shot on social media. It shows Nataliia standing on the roof of a building with an Igla man-portable air defence system (MANPADS) on her shoulder. Seconds later, the missile hurtles into the sky, a curved path of white smoke trailing behind it. Nataliia kneels to put down the launch tube and joins her hands together as if in silent prayer. Then there is an explosion.

"Did you get it?" the other women ask each other. Then, when they are sure, they shout joyfully: "You got it! Natasha, you got it!"

It was her first combat mission.

Nataliia Hrabarchuk talked to Ukrainska Pravda about going from preschool teacher to anti-aircraft gunner, the challenges of downing a missile that’s travelling at breakneck speed, and what you lose and gain when you choose to join the army. 

Hers seems a simple story, and our experience as consumers of news and social media in wartime has made us greedy for interesting things. But sometimes it’s useful to remind ourselves that our perspective is distorted, that the habituality of an act does not diminish its value, and that small victories are the bricks from which a great victory is built.

Waiting for an aerial target

What’s it like being an anti-aircraft gunner?

Hunting down a missile is like competing in a 60-metre sprint. You go to the track every day, you train for months hoping to get to the championship. And when you get there, everything is decided by the seven seconds after the starting shot that will show whether you’ve succeeded or not.

An anti-aircraft gunner has even less time: five seconds from the moment the missile is detected. Too slow, and the target will be missed.

For millions of Ukrainians, an air-raid warning is a sign to stop working and take cover. For Nataliia Hrabarchuk it means the exact opposite: it's time to get to work. She spends months waiting at her position for an aerial target. And almost always the wait ends in nothing.

But sometimes there are exceptions. Sometimes the air defence systems detect a target flying towards her. Then Nataliia slings her Igla over her shoulder and waits for instructions.

The system weighs 18 kg (nearly 40 lb). The hardest part, Nataliia says, is throwing it over her shoulder. This is done when the distance between the shooter and the target is reduced to about 10 km (just over 6 miles).

Hrabarchuk describes one of her toughest missions: "One time in winter, the missile threat lasted about nine hours. It was so cold, there was such a blizzard! I remember having to lift the missile, and I didn't have the strength."

But once the Igla is on her shoulder, she doesn't feel the weight – adrenaline takes over. At any moment her partner could warn her that a target is close. As soon as the target appears, you need to carry out a series of actions.

You have to "make a puncture" – that is, connect the battery with a sharp movement that starts all the processes in the MANPADS. The power supply only lasts 30 seconds, and if you don't shoot, you won't be able to use the battery again. You also need to set the correct mode on the weapon depending on whether the target is flying towards you or the missile will have to catch up with it (in the latter case, it is given the necessary boost). Finally, you need to keep the target in sight so that the homing head can detect the heat from it. Only then do you fire the shot.

Mastering the Igla was not easy for Nataliia.

"It was really difficult for me to learn all this. At night, everyone in the barrack would go to bed and I’d be sitting there studying. I had to recreate everything in my head in order to understand how the missile works. I can’t just rote-learn stuff, I have to understand it. So I had to figure out the details," Nataliia says. "But I always achieve my goal – I'm stubborn."

There are three of them in her mobile firing team. Nataliia's shot at the Russian missile was coordinated by Private First Class Valentyna Steblevets. Private First Class Olha Maksymenko recorded it on video, and it was her words – "Natasha, you got it!" – that became a meme in Ukraine.

The kindergarten years

"Imagine you’re visiting a school to meet the pupils," I suggest to Nataliia. "The teacher says: ‘Children, this is Nataliia – she’s a soldier.’ She asks you to tell them about yourself. What do you say to them?"

"When you go to see children, you want to talk about something good," Nataliia answers. "I would tell them about how I used to be a teacher. I really loved what I did."

Nataliia Hrabarchuk spent almost ten years teaching children in a kindergarten. Why she chose the profession she can only guess at now. Perhaps she was following in the footsteps of her mother, who worked as a teacher's assistant. Or maybe she was guided by practical considerations: a teacher will always find work.

Nataliia will never forget her first day. She had been assigned to a kindergarten in a distant village, which meant travelling two hours a day. She had the oldest group. And at one point, one of her five-year-old charges decided that she was old enough to go home on her own. And off she ran – "over the field and through the wood". Nataliia noticed that the child was missing, kicked off her high heels in a panic and chased after her barefoot.

If Nataliia's stories about her small charges were set to music, it would be Yann Tiersen's most famous composition about a day from another summer – there’s so much warmth, tenderness and nostalgia in these memories. It seems that Nataliia could talk about her work at the kindergarten for hours.

The most important thing the children taught her was to be happy. Nataliia fell out of love with the state education system because it deprived children of happiness.

"I did see unhappy children. In our state-run kindergartens, we still have the stale, old, outdated Soviet education system! For the most part, everything there follows a template: every day has to be scheduled minute by minute. And when children have no choice, they are unhappy," Nataliia says fervently. "A child in kindergarten can’t say that they don’t want to attend a class.

If they see a child playing on the carpet because you, as the teacher, decided to cancel classes that day, they can punish you. If there’s a lesson on the timetable, then it has to happen, and that’s that.

And when you go against the system, it pushes you out."

"It’s not a job for women"

The years Nataliia spent working at the kindergarten were a time of constant poverty. Every summer holiday she would go to Poland to do seasonal work, which enabled her to pay off the debts she had accumulated. It is painful for her to admit this, but she has never gone on holiday with her daughter, not once in her life.

So when Nataliia started thinking about changing jobs, her cousin, a career officer, suggested that she consider serving in the army. This was before Russia’s full-scale invasion. The army definitely paid better than being a teacher.

But because of her cousin, Nataliia was also well aware of the other side of a military career.

"I remember – I already had my daughter by then – when his family was just getting started. His wife never saw him. He was going on a combat mission, he was going to the front line as a platoon commander, and his wife was being taken to the hospital to give birth to their first daughter. I remember the pain in his eyes. He wasn’t there when his children were born, he wasn’t there to see them grow up. They’re at school now, and he doesn’t see them."

"That isn’t for women," Nataliia's parents had told her when she wanted to join the military in the ninth grade. Years later, when their daughter came back to the idea of serving, they said the same thing: "It's not a woman's job."

Only this time Nataliia didn’t listen to them.

And as if following the same pattern, Nataliia was confronted by the problems her cousin had faced.

"The only thing I lost was time with my family," Nataliia admits. "When I joined the army, it was as if I left my family."

"And what did you get in return for the time you didn't spend with your family?" I ask.

"It's not always about getting something. Look, when I shot down the missile, I may have saved someone's life. I’m where I’m meant to be. That's enough."

***

Nataliia's father helped to clean up after Chornobyl. He transported concrete for the construction of the sarcophagus. For years Nataliia wondered why he was so reluctant to talk about his work.

She only understood him after the full-scale invasion (on 24 February 2022, Nataliia came out of the shower, saw her commander's order on her phone, and set off for the unit with her hair still wet). Now Nataliia would rather not talk about the war.

But when her perfect shot was seen by the whole country, Nataliia had to answer a lot of phone calls, replaying this episode of the war over and over again. One call sent a chill down her spine – when her mother rang and gave her an earful because it wasn’t from her that she’d found out about this dangerous situation she’d been involved in.

Over time, as Nataliia began to see more and more videos of her fellow anti-aircraft gunners’ hits, she reflected that the video of her going viral might have been a good thing after all.

"I said to the girls, ‘Look how our guys started shooting after that. They’ve downed a lot of targets with Iglas. Maybe we inspired them to believe in their abilities and stand up for themselves. Because if Natasha could do it, why can't a man who could easily carry a Natasha on his shoulders?’"

Author: Rustem Khalilov
Translation: Myroslava Zavadska
Editing: Teresa Pearce