Zhukovska, from a small town in western Ukraine, is a jolly paramedic with wavy dark hair and a birth mark on her right cheek. She has been volunteering as a nurse in the opposition's sprawling tent camp on the Maidan for nearly three months, sleeping in tents, in dormitories set up in several administrative buildings seized by protesters, and in the homes of sympathetic Kiev residents.
"I am apolitical, I am not member of any party. I am simply with the people," a weak and pale-looking Zhukovska, her neck bandaged, told the AP. "I couldn't watch this on TV. I had to be with the people."
She said she was shot as she walked around the camp with several friends. She became disoriented and thought that a grenade had exploded near her.
"And then they told me: 'Sweetheart, a sniper has shot you,'" Zhukovska recalled. "Then I looked at my hands and they were covered in blood, and I said, that's it, I am dying."
One photo making the rounds on social media shows Zhukovska looking shocked, her eyes closed, clutching her bleeding neck and being led away by activists. As soon as she was taken to an ambulance, she said, she grabbed her phone and with fingers covered with blood, she tapped out "I am dying," on her Vkontakte account, the local equivalent of Facebook. It is also linked to her Twitter page. Then, a doctor in the ambulance took the phone away.
