The first time Iryna Zarutska saw the Charlotte skyline, she pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the airport shuttle and whispered a single word in Ukrainian: “Svoboda.” Freedom. It was August 2022, and the 20-year-old refugee from Kyiv had just survived six months of Russian artillery that turned her childhood neighborhood into a graveyard of shattered glass and twisted steel. Clutching a worn sketchbook and a plastic bag of clothes, she stepped into the humid North Carolina night with nothing but a promise: I will not let the war win.

Huntersville welcomed her like a soft landing. Her aunt’s modest ranch house smelled of pine cleaner and fresh cornbread—scents so foreign they made her cry. For the first week, Iryna slept on an air mattress in the living room, waking every hour to the silence of no explosions. “I kept waiting for the sirens,” she later told a friend. “Then I realized the loudest sound was the refrigerator humming. I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.”

That laugh—bright, unfiltered, contagious—became her trademark. Neighbors heard it drifting from the backyard where she helped her uncle build a chicken coop, her small hands surprisingly strong as she hammered nails with the same precision she used to restore 19th-century oil paintings back in Kyiv. At Synergy College, she’d been the star pupil in art restoration, the one professors said could “breathe soul into cracked porcelain.” War stole her studio, but not her talent. In America, she started small: refinishing a thrift-store dresser with hand-painted vines, turning a $15 flea-market mirror into a sunburst of gold leaf. Word spread. Soon, local boutiques paid her to upcycle vintage frames, each piece signed with a tiny embroidered bee—her secret signature for “I’m still buzzing with life.”

English was the mountain she climbed next. Community college night classes became her battlefield. While other students doodled in margins, Iryna filled entire notebooks with vocabulary trees: hope → wish → dream → future. Her accent was thick, but her determination thicker. She practiced by narrating her day to the family’s rescue dog, a one-eyed beagle named Pickles. “Today, Pickles, I learned the word grit. It means me.” The dog thumped his tail in agreement.

Love found her in the parking lot of a Harris Teeter supermarket. Alex, a lanky paramedic with a crooked smile, was buying ice cream for his niece when Iryna—still mastering grocery carts—rammed into his shin. Instead of yelling, he laughed. “You drive like you’re dodging missiles,” he teased. She blushed crimson. Three months later, he was teaching her stick shift in an abandoned Kmart lot, patient as she stalled, restarted, and finally whooped when the car lurched forward without dying. Their first date? A picnic of borscht (her recipe) and Bojangles chicken (his). She drew him on a napkin—superhero cape made of pizza boxes. He still has it taped inside his locker at the fire station.

Charlotte called to her the way Kyiv’s Podil district once had: graffiti-splashed walls, live music spilling from bars, the smell of street tacos at 2 a.m. In spring 2023, she and Alex moved into a $900 loft above a tattoo parlor in NoDa. The stairs creaked, the shower pressure was a joke, but the skylight bathed her easel in perfect northern light. She enrolled at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, juggling animal science labs with literature seminars. Her goal: veterinary technician. “Animals don’t care where you’re from,” she told her advisor. “They just want to be seen.” Weekends, she volunteered at the Humane Society, bottle-feeding orphaned kittens while humming lullabies in Ukrainian. One tiny tabby, born with a twisted paw, became her shadow. She named him Kyiv and vowed to adopt him the day she could afford pet rent.

Zepeddie’s Pizzeria hired her for the dinner rush. The owner, a gruff New Yorker named Vinny, took one look at her chalkboard doodles and promoted her to “menu artist.” Iryna transformed the daily specials board into a rotating gallery: pepperoni pies became fiery suns, margherita slices turned into watercolor gardens. Customers lingered just to watch her work, flour dusting her black apron like snow. Tips poured in. So did friendships. The line cooks taught her Southern slang; she taught them how to roll varenyky. On slow Tuesdays, the whole staff closed early and played cards in the walk-in cooler, Iryna’s laughter echoing off stainless steel.

Her art evolved with her confidence. She began welding—self-taught from YouTube videos—twisting rebar into delicate birds that seemed ready to take flight. A local gallery gave her a corner for a solo show titled Shelter Sketches. Opening night, she wore a dress she’d sewn from vintage Ukrainian embroidery and American denim. Over 200 people came. A retired veteran bought her centerpiece—a phoenix forged from shrapnel-like metal—for $800. She cried in the bathroom, then used the money to buy Kyiv his first cat tree.

Family remained her anchor and her ache. Weekly Zoom calls with her father in Kyiv were sacred. He’d lost 30 pounds; she’d gained 10 from stress-eating Bojangles. “Send me a photo of your new life,” he’d beg. She’d pan the camera across her loft: the mural of sunflowers she’d painted on the brick wall, the shelf of veterinary textbooks, Alex snoring on the couch with Kyiv on his chest. “See, Papa? We made it.” But some nights, after hanging up, she’d sit on the fire escape and stare at the moon, wondering if it looked the same over the Dnipro.

By 2025, Iryna was unstoppable. She’d aced her certification exams, landed a part-time gig at a vet clinic, and was saving for UNC Charlotte’s pre-vet program. Her Instagram—@iryna.makes—had 12,000 followers who adored her “warrior thrift flips” and rescue-animal reels. She mentored other Ukrainian teens in Charlotte, teaching them to turn trauma into tattoos of strength. At a July 4th block party, she led a group mural: a giant American flag morphing into a Ukrainian tryzub, both dripping with painted fireworks. The photo went viral on local news. Commenters called her “Charlotte’s sunshine.”

But sunshine casts shadows. Friends noticed small cracks: the way she flinched at fireworks, how she’d scrub her hands raw after handling knives at the pizzeria, the 3 a.m. texts to Alex—“Are you awake? I heard bombing.” Therapy was expensive; pride was free. She journaled instead, pages filled with frantic Ukrainian scrawl no one else could read. She told herself the nightmares would fade. They didn’t.

On the surface, though, she glowed. The night before everything shattered, she hosted a pizzay dinner for her “American family”—Alex, her siblings, coworkers, even Vinny. She served honey cake and Carolina pulled pork, toasting with sweet tea and horilka smuggled in her mother’s suitcase. Someone filmed her speech: arms wide, eyes shining, voice steady. “Two years ago, I thought joy was dead. Tonight, I know it’s just getting started.” The room erupted. Kyiv the cat stole a piece of pork and bolted under the couch. Laughter chased him.

No one saw the storm coming. Not the way her smile froze when a customer yelled about cold pizza. Not the extra shifts she picked up to “stay busy.” Not the untouched journal entry dated the day before: “Some days, the shelter feels closer than this apartment.”

Iryna Zarutska—the girl who turned rubble into rainbows, who carried an entire nation’s hope in a 20-year-old heart—was still fighting a war no one else could see. And on one ordinary August evening in 2025, the battle turned outward.

Her story isn’t over. But the chapter that ended in blood began with a backpack, a sketchbook, and a laugh that refused to die.