Before she could take the job as the lead advocate for soldiers’ rights in the Ukrainian military, Olha Reshetylova had to create the position herself.
It was no easy task, given the enemies she had made. For 10 lonely years, she had toiled as a civil activist raising awareness about military abuses. The armed forces had no dedicated officials to field complaints from troops, such as cases in which superior officers retaliated against soldiers by threatening to send them on deadly missions.
Any criticism of the army is sensitive in Ukraine, where the institution is highly respected for sustaining a war for national survival against Russia since 2014. Ms. Reshetylova, 40, faced threats of criminal prosecution for her investigations. At one point, she said, a commander ordered his soldiers to point rifles at her to prevent her from entering a base. She was the target of an online smear campaign that cast her as a foreign agent.
She remained steadfast, and last October, she was appointed by President Volodymyr Zelensky as the military’s first ombudsman. He had asked her to formulate the role herself.
Soldiers in Ukraine’s nearly one-million-strong army have since submitted thousands of complaints about their treatment. Ms. Reshetylova said that reinforced her belief in the importance of her role more than four years into a brutal all-out trench war.
“Even under shelling, even in the army, even during war — first and foremost is dignity,” she said.
Ms. Reshetylova’s quest is in part personal. Her husband is fighting in the war. The couple have two sons, ages 5 and 14, who also could end up fighting if the war drags on.
That reality helps fortify her during difficult interactions with military commanders.
“Of course, sometimes you can see skepticism in their eyes,” she said. But, she added, based on the legal mandate she created, “the commanders must accept me.”
Some officers tell her to spend some time at command posts on the front before giving advice. “I treat this with a bit of humor,” she said. “I’ve probably spent more time at command posts than some commanders.”
Ms. Reshetylova is attuned to the merciless challenges that solders face in a war fought increasingly with drones, like prolonged stays in buried bunkers with no possibility to go aboveground for sanitation or to evacuate wounded comrades.
“This requires changes in training doctrine,” she said. “We now need to prepare soldiers for long-term survival in confined spaces,” she added, saying they would need “to know how to survive in temperatures of minus 20 without being able to light a fire.” Any flame could reveal their position.
In 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea and fomented separatist conflicts in eastern Ukraine, Ms. Reshetylova was caring for the first of her children.
She began to get involved in war-related issues after Ukrainian soldiers from her town became encircled on the eastern front. She raised money to buy body armor for other soldiers.
Eventually, she co-founded a nongovernmental organization called Come Back Alive. She also began working in human rights journalism, focusing mostly on soldiers’ rights.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she devoted most of her time to documenting Russian war crimes. But after encountering many violations against Ukrainian soldiers by their own commanders, she returned to her earlier focus on soldiers’ rights.
Before becoming military ombudsman, Ms. Reshetylova was appointed to a precursor role as commissioner for protecting soldiers’ rights. Mr. Zelensky offered her that job at an evening meeting on Dec. 30, 2024, and asked her to write legislation defining the military ombudsman position. He had come around to the idea of the post after a push by civil activists.
In a statement after her appointment, Mr. Zelensky called Ms. Reshetylova “a well-known, experienced and effective Ukrainian human rights advocate.”
Ms. Reshetylova walked out of the president’s office in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, that day and promptly got lost in the dark streets, where intersections are blocked by sandbags and checkpoints protecting the government quarter.
“It was cold, dark and I was completely alone,” she said. “I had no team, no staff, nothing. I was just on my own. ‘God, what do I do?’ I thought.”
She called Ruslan Tsyhankov, a former military prosecutor and longtime collaborator, and asked for help. He would become her deputy. They would spend months drafting their vision for the military ombudsman role.
The army brass, reluctant to accept oversight, had allies in Parliament. Ms. Reshetylova braced herself for a hostile reception.
As she delivered her pitch to lawmakers from the parliamentary rostrum, “I started speaking in that dry way, required by the protocol, explaining the draft law — and realized no one was listening,” she said.
Then she pushed her papers away and shouted: “I beg you, this decision is needed by a million soldiers!”
The bill passed.
Since then, said Pavlo Palisa, the deputy head of the office of the president and a former brigade commander, the administration has “established a constructive and systematic partnership with the Office of the Military Ombudsman.”
“Today,” he added, “protecting the rights of military personnel, improving communication within the system and responding quickly to critical situations directly affect both public trust in institutions and the effectiveness of the army.”
On a recent visit to a brigade in western Ukraine, Ms. Reshetylova walked among soldiers’ tents in a forest, attentive to her surroundings.
The troops, of the 162nd Mechanized Brigade, would soon deploy to the harsh combat at the front. There, they would have enough problems fighting Russian forces. Ms. Reshetylova was there to protect them from other things: their own commanders, abusive colleagues, violations of Ukrainian laws.
She spotted a soldier who was sitting on a bench, clearly in poor health, with a crutch beside him. The commander who was accompanying her, Col. Dmytro Borodiy, said that he had at least 20 recruits in a similar condition and did not know what to do with them.
Draft officers were picking up men like these even though they were more a burden than a benefit, Colonel Borodiy said, adding that he had no legal right to leave them behind when the brigade deployed toward the front. Ms. Reshetylova said she would raise the issue with officials in Kyiv.
A larger problem, the commander said, was the soldiers who run away.
Colonel Borodiy described a newly enlisted soldier who was a movie director and who, on arriving for training, was “looking thin, legs trembling, hands trembling, eyes wide.” The recruit was told that his job could be filming videos about the brigade. “But no, in three days, the movie director vanished,” Colonel Borodiy said.
According to government data, about 200,000 Ukrainian soldiers have at some point been away without leave, many fleeing within days of arriving at basic training.
To fix the problem, military commanders had been asking for punishments: rules that would freeze bank accounts, revoke driver’s licenses or increase criminal liability.
Instead, Ms. Reshetylova added a three-day adaptation course to the roughly monthlong basic training. The course, run by psychologists dressed in civilian clothing, is intended to soften the often traumatic first days of transition to military life.
The same day, she visited a camp for soldiers who had been arrested after going absent without leave. Troops in such camps often get a chance to change their brigade. Enlistment in a poorly run brigade is a common reason that soldiers leave the army.
She boarded a bus of soldiers leaving to join new units. “Have you heard who the military ombudsman is?” she asked. They had not. “Please write to us if you have any issues,” she added.
Protecting soldiers’ rights will make the military stronger, Ms. Reshetylova said, by helping to reduce both draft dodging and AWOL cases.
But she acknowledged that despite her mandate, her sway was still limited in the military. There was, after all, a war to fight, one for which Ukraine desperately needs soldiers.
This was the “main challenge,” Ms. Reshetylova said: “How do you build an army basically from civilians?”
