A Russian woman nicknamed 'Simba' who defected and fought for Ukraine buried in a military funeral

• A funeral was held in Kyiv on Friday for a native-Russian woman who joined the Ukrainian army.
• Olga Simonova, 34, previously fought in the war in the Donbas for Russia before switching sides.

A funeral was held in Kyiv on Friday for a native-Russian woman who defected and fought with the Ukrainian army.

AP reports that an honor guard fired a three-gun salute to honor Olga Simonova, 34, who was killed in combat.

On top of her coffin was the Ukrainian flag and a toy lion, a nod to her nickname of "Simba" after The Lion King character.

Speaking to AP earlier in the year, Simonova explained that she grew up a patriotic Russian patriot but became disenchanted after reading about Russia's war in Chechneya and its actions in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, so she switched sides.

"I had this internal feeling that I could handle it and that what I was doing was right and necessary because I can't turn a blind eye to the situation," she said. "I just had to buy a one-way ticket. I bought it, and I left," she told AP.

She became a paramedic and a volunteer fighter and later formally enlisted as a member of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. She was eventually promoted to sergeant and was given command of both infantry and artillery units in the Donbas war fighting against Russian-backed separatists.

Simonova said she never hid her Russian origin from the people she fought alongside. She received Ukrainian citizenship in 2017.

Friends and colleagues told AP that Simonova was redeployed to the Kherson region after Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

They said a landmine hit her vehicle on September 13, which killed her.

"She was respected not only as a commander but as a person," Dmytro Karabinovskyi, her former commander and friend, told AP.

Simonova was born in the city of Chelyabinsk in west-central Russia and was a keen sportswoman who excelled in mountain climbing and karate.

Speaking of her former homeland to local news outlet Novynarnia in 2018, she said, "children are brought up in a military-patriotic way from an early age. This has always been the case in Russia. Then these people are very easy to manipulate: you just need to show where the enemy is, and they will be indifferent to evidence of common sense."