b. 1995
Yana Zinkevych
Founder of the Hospitallers battalion
At 19, with no medical training, she set up a volunteer medical battalion and carried the wounded out under fire herself. Yana Zinkevych founded the Hospitallers, and after a 2015 car crash she kept leading them from a wheelchair. By October 2026 the battalion had evacuated over 46,000 people.
Key accomplishments
- Founded the volunteer medical battalion Hospitallers (2014); more than 46,000 people evacuated as of October 2026, by the battalion’s count
- Personally carried about 200 wounded from the battlefield before December 2015
- Set up a paramedic school: the Hospitallers have trained more than 2,000 combat medics
- Order For Merit, 3rd class (2015); Forbes 30 Under 30 (2020); BBC 100 Women (2022); TIME100 Next (2023)
- Member of parliament of the 9th convocation; heads the subcommittee on military medicine
Nineteen, and no medical degree
Yana Zinkevych was born in 1995 in Rivne. When russia’s aggression in the east began in the spring of 2014, she had no medical training. Even so, that summer, at 19, she went to the front as a volunteer medic with a Right Sector battalion and learned on the job. Soon she was heading the medical service of the Volunteer Ukrainian Corps, and out of it grew a separate medical battalion: the Hospitallers. It was named after the medieval Knights Hospitaller, a monastic order of knights who cared for pilgrims to the Holy Land, and took as its motto “For the sake of every life!”
Under fire
Yana drove to the front line herself to collect the wounded. The battalion worked in the hottest spots of those years: Pisky, near Donetsk airport, Shyrokyne, around Debaltseve. By later accounts, by the end of 2015 she had personally carried about two hundred soldiers out from under fire. On 1 December 2015, at 20, she was awarded the Order For Merit, 3rd class.
The crash that didn’t stop her
Four days later, on 5 December 2015, the car she was travelling in near Dnipro skidded on a slippery road and rolled over several times. Yana suffered a severe spinal injury and has used a wheelchair ever since. But she didn’t leave the battalion: instead of going out herself, she organised evacuations, kept the crews supplied and trained new medics. In 2015 the Hospitallers opened a training centre in Pavlohrad, and later a permanent paramedic school that has trained more than two thousand combat medics.
Thousands saved
The Hospitallers have remained a volunteer battalion that runs on donations. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022 their crews have worked along the whole front line. As of October 2026, by the battalion’s count, they had evacuated more than 46,000 people. In 2019 Yana was elected to parliament, where she heads the subcommittee on military medicine and works on the rights of wounded soldiers and veterans. She has been named in Forbes 30 Under 30, BBC 100 Women and TIME100 Next.
Why it matters today
Yana Zinkevych showed that even without experience or a degree, one determined person can build what the state hadn’t yet provided: a medical service that carries the wounded off the front line. What she started at 19 grew into a battalion and a school that have saved tens of thousands of people and trained thousands of medics. A severe injury didn’t stop her; it changed the way she fights. Anyone who drives a wounded soldier back from the front today, or learns to stop bleeding, carries on what a girl from Rivne began in 2014.
