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One of the honor guards fired a three-gun salute into the cloudy sky where friends and comrades in arms gathered in Kyiv to bid farewell to a Russian woman killed while fighting alongside Ukraine in the war with her native country.

Olga Simonova, 34, was remembered for her courage and kindness at a funeral in the Ukrainian capital on Friday, where Simonova's coffin was draped with the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag, with a beloved lion toy on top. Her nickname was "Simba," like the main character in Disney's "The Lion King" cartoon.

A few days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Simonova spoke to the Associated Press in a trench in the Donbas region, where she had worked for years alongside Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russian-backed separatists.

Also born in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, Simonova was very interested in sports and excelled in both mountain climbing and karate.

But she began to feel uncomfortable about her native country after reading about the Russian war in Chechnya and its actions in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014, filled with doubts that she “would be able at any time to raise her country's flag” again, so Simonova made a life-changing decision: she traveled to Ukraine to join the conflict in Donbas on the Ukrainian side, first as a volunteer fighter, then as a medic, and finally as a enlisted member of the armed forces.

She said, "I had an inner feeling that I could handle it and that what I was doing was right and necessary, because I can't ignore the situation, I just had to buy a one-way ticket, I bought it and left."

Simonova also said she never hid her Russian origin from her colleagues and earned their trust by showing her commitment to Ukraine on the battlefield. In 2017 she obtained Ukrainian citizenship, became a sergeant, and was given command of both infantry and artillery units.

Friends and colleagues said Simonova, who was unmarried and had no children, was recently redeployed from the east to the southern Kherson region, where Ukraine launched a counteroffensive against Russian forces, and added she died on September 13, after her car hit a landmine.