Giulia Schiff got married in Ukraine, stopped fighting and has now founded a humanitarian association with her husband Victor, 29, also a former soldier. The 24-year-old Italian, who had enlisted with Kiev’s troops since the beginning of the war, fought in various territories, from Donbass to Karkhiv, but has now founded a charitable organization to support the militias.
His story starts from that controversial “baptism of flight” five years ago, which ended up in the swimming pool of the Latina air force base, and reaches the long direct crossings to the front in Donbass to assist the militias fighting Putin. In between there are nine months as a real soldier in Ukraine since the outbreak of war, where she has worn nothing but camouflage: the only exception for one day will be her white dress. Giulia Schiff got married in Ukraine, stopped fighting and has now founded a humanitarian association with her husband, in the past a fellow soldier of hers.
The 24-year-old former pilot from Venice, who in Italy a few years earlier as a student of the Pozzuoli Academy had reported being a victim of mobbing and hazing, now lives in Dnipro with Victor, a 29-year-old Israeli-Ukrainian whom she had met last May in the Foreign Legion . «We were both on the front line – says Giulia, who wears the wedding ring celebrated on Valentine’s Day on her finger – He had come from Israel, where he left his business to defend his other homeland which is the Ukraine, then due to the damage suffered by the shock waves of the bombs had to stop. To be close to him, in November I dropped everything and went back to him. But we have not stopped going to the front. Now we have founded a charity organization. It is called “Cloud Walker”, it brings aid to soldiers, hospitals and even elderly people without food who are camped near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. And there are many other projects in the pipeline, such as creating a mobile hospital and setting up an orphanage. All this thanks to a humanitarian fund”.
If this is Giulia’s third life, immediately after that as a fighter, 2021 had marked the first decisive moment: the Council of State had confirmed her definitive expulsion from the Air Force, rejecting Schiff’s appeal, which argued instead that the real exclusion from the Corps was not the absence of military and professional aptitude, but the fact of having denounced the hazing acts. Among these, Giulia claims, is her rite of baptism of flight, shown in a 2018 video in which you can see slaps and whippings suffered before ending up in the pool. A goliardic tradition which, however, that day, according to his words, would have taken a different turn.
Then in 2021 the bombings of Kiev begin and the young Venetian leaves with the foreign legion: she who had had to accept the end of the dream of being an airman, in a few weeks became ‘Kida’, taking up the rifle in the Masada team and in the 59th brigade of the army, drafted for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense in ground forces and special forces units, front-line reconnaissance missions and mechanized infantry on tanks. Until last November. «Now me and Victor, nickname ‘Wolf’, have closed our military contracts and still in camouflage we go to the front to bring aid. We will stay here, where people say I am more Ukrainian than their other compatriots”. In May, however, Giulia and Victor will return to Italy for a few days, to Verona: «we will have the religious ceremony of our wedding and I will wear the white dress». For the soldier bride, Italy remains the place to make dreams come true, this time in tulle and amphibians.