Yulia Tolopa

Yulia Tolopa (call sign "Valkyrie"), (; ; born 1995) is a Russian-born female volunteer who fought for Ukraine in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Tolopa grew up as a Russian nationalist and Cossack and at the age of eighteen became a Russian Federation champion of hand to hand combat. She went to Kyiv to see the 2014 Ukrainian revolution firsthand. Joining the Ukrainian volunteer Aidar Battalion, she fought against some of her former friends. Her family and Russian media declared her a traitor, and the Russian government threatened her with imprisonment. After a year she left the military to give birth to a daughter. Afterward, she returned to fighting, first with the Donbas Battalion, then with the 16th battalion of the 58th Independent Motorized Infantry Brigade of the Ukraine regular army, when women were officially allowed to take part in combat.

Ukrainian bureaucracy for years delayed giving her Ukrainian nationality and made her fear deportation back to Russia. Tolopa finally received Ukrainian nationality in 2021. In the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tolopa sheltered in western Ukraine with her daughter.

Early life

Yulia Tolopa was born in 1995 and raised in Podkumok, Stavropol Krai, a rural settlement near Pyatigorsk, in southern Russia just north of the Caucasus. Her paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were Ukrainian, from Zaporizhzhia.

Tolopa spent her childhood with Russian nationalists, who taught her how to fight. She learned to shoot guns and trained at the military sports club "Yermak", learning mixed martial arts and cage fighting. First she participated in the remaining EuroMaidan encampment, then when Russian troops entered Sloviansk she volunteered to fight against the Russians.

At least once, at Lutuhyne, Tolopa fought against the Don Cossack troops which she had formerly been part of. Her mother resumed speaking to her by phone after the birth; they avoid discussing politics. Tolopa and Miroslava lived in a Kyiv apartment with a female friend that Tolopa had met at Maidan. Her roommate was nicknamed Belka (squirrel) and was a former fashion designer from Dnipropetrovsk, participated in the war in Donbas, and left after receiving a traumatic brain injury. She subsequently volunteered for regular short trips to the Anti-Terrorist Operation Zone doing aerial reconnaissance. She was serving as a drone operator in the "Donbas-Ukraine" battalion (reorganized from the former volunteer Donbas Battalion) by January 2017, and in the middle of the year joined the 16th battalion of the 58th Infantry Brigade. and another by American photojournalist J.T. Blatty, exhibited in 2019–2020. Also in 2018, she was interviewed for a chapter telling her story in Girls Cutting Their Locks, a book about women in the Russo-Ukrainian war published by the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance.

Applying for Ukrainian citizenship

Tolopa was repeatedly refused Ukrainian citizenship when she applied for it. In December 2016, in a televised incident, Tolopa threw tomato juice on the politician Oleh Liashko outside the Verkhovna Rada, accusing him of breaking his promise to help her get Ukrainian citizenship. Liashko said that only the President could grant citizenship, but confirmed that he had requested it for her. Even so, Tolopa was again refused naturalization in January 2017.

In December 2017, Tolopa was denied nationality a third time, this time because she did not have a certificate of non-conviction (lack of criminal record) from Russia, which she would need to get in Russia or from the Russian consulate, where she was afraid to go for fear of detention on Russian sovereign territory. She believed this denial meant she would be deported, and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group appealed on her behalf. The State Migration Service publicly stated that she would not be deported, and could remain in Ukraine indefinitely as a person in need of additional protection. On 5 December, Tolopa was accompanied by friends, fellow soldiers, and members of parliament (Nadiya Savchenko, Ihor Lutsenko, Mustafa Nayyem, and ) to protect her from being detained as she went to the Russian consulate in Kyiv to request her certificate.

In June 2019, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy named her among 14 foreigners granted citizenship by presidential decree for fighting for Ukraine. The decree specified that those bestowed citizenship would have to provide necessary documentation to meet requirements of the migration service, but granted them the right to a two-year temporary passport. One of those requirements included that Tolopa formally renounce her Russian citizenship. Russia would not allow her to renounce her Russian citizenship, because she had criminal charges and a request for her extradition pending against her (for fighting for Ukraine). Because the period for the two-year temporary passport had expired, an extension of the processing period was submitted to the Rada. They kept refusing to approve the extension through July and October 2021, which, in theory, could have lost Tolopa her conferred citizenship.

Tolopa went to court in October 2021 and obtained a ruling that she could submit a declaration of renunciation to the migration service because obtaining the documents for renunciation posed a threat to her well-being. Though she turned in the required documentation, the migration department appealed the decision; they lost their appeal.

Personal life

By mid-2016, Tolopa was in a relationship with a woman She had become fluent in Ukrainian, but remained in the Ukrainian military reserve.