Sunday 8 May 2022 10:50 PM IAN BIRRELL: The songbird of Mariupol who'll fight on till the end trends now
The shaky video picks out the woman leading the singing in the darkness, her clear voice imbuing the patriotic songs with an exquisite beauty that belies the desolation of her surroundings.
For she is singing in a bomb shelter amid the shattered hell of Mariupol, accompanied by a low murmur from a chorus line of men sitting beside her.
Her name is Kateryna. She joined the army last year after completing her music studies and, at the age of 21, she finds herself fighting for her life as a member of the heroic band of Ukrainian fighters making a desperate last stand in a besieged factory.
Her sublime singing on the extraordinary video – shot somewhere in the warren of tunnels and basements beneath the sprawling Azovstal steel plant on the outskirts of the port city – has become a social media hit in Ukraine.
Her name is Kateryna. She joined the army last year after completing her music studies and, at the age of 21, she finds herself fighting for her life as a member of the heroic band of Ukrainian fighters making a desperate last stand in a besieged factory
The footage of Kateryna, gun in hand, singing two songs was posted by Nik Mark, another trapped fighter, last Thursday – and she was rapidly acclaimed across the country as Steel Bird after her location and military nickname of Bird.
Yesterday, after the final civilians were evacuated from the plant, leaders of the surrounded Ukraine troops held an online press conference to declare that they would fight to the death against Vladimir Putin’s invading forces.
‘We will continue to fight as long as we are alive to repel the Russian occupiers,’ said captain Svyatoslav Palamar, deputy commander of the Azov regiment.
There may be up to 2,000 Ukrainian troops still holed up in the plant. Their resistance has tied down Russian forces and thwarted Putin’s bid to capture the city before today’s Victory Day parade.
It is understood their conditions are atrocious after 74 days of war during which the strategically crucial port on the Sea of Azov has been devastated by bombardment.
There are believed to be scores of badly wounded men alongside piles of corpses beneath the massive Soviet plant, which dates back to the 1930s. The fighters, whose resolute defence has been hailed by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, are suffering from acute shortages of food, medicine and munitions.
Kateryna, whose singing has made her a symbol of national defiance, is understood to come from Sosnivka, a small village in the west of the country, where she was a creative student renowned for her love of the arts and positive spirit.
She wrote songs, performed on stage and had poems published in a newspaper. After graduating from the singing department of an art college in the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil, she worked in a motorbike
