Sarah Ashton-Cirillo

Starting in March 2022, Ashton-Cirillo reported on the Russian invasion of Ukraine from Kharkiv, Ukraine, primarily for LGBTQ Nation. A trans woman, she is thought to have been the only transgender journalist covering the invasion. In Kharkiv, she worked closely with the Ukrainian military and police, and was appointed by the mayor of Zolochiv, Kharkiv Oblast, as a representative to advocate with aid groups. After witnessing the October 2022 Kyiv missile strikes, she resigned from LGBTQ Nation to become a combat medic in Ukraine's Noman Çelebicihan Battalion, a Crimean Tatar unit.

Ashton-Cirillo described herself as a progressive activist and leftist libertarian when she was active in Nevada politics, and has since referred to herself as a "recovering political operative"; she has been described in The Washington Post and The Nevada Independent as a liberal activist and in the Las Vegas Review-Journal as "unapologetically left-leaning". She was a registered member of the Democratic Party as of February 2022.

She arrived in Ukraine through Poland on 4 March 2022. Having transitioned since her time in Syria, she was initially hesitant to enter the country based on things she had heard about LGBT rights in Ukraine. Ukrainian border authorities made her remove her wig when they reviewed her travel documents. While her Nevada driver's license reflects her changed name and gender identity as a woman, her U.S. passport does not, and as a result she was issued a press credential that refers to her primarily by her current name but notes her former name as well. Ashton-Cirillo has said she understands both decisions; regarding the latter, she told the Washington Blade, "I was okay with it because I couldn't believe they credentialed me anyway with the situation being the way it was." After entering the country she went to Lviv, and from there, wanting to be closer to the front lines, to Ivano-Frankivsk. There, two men invited her to come to Kharkiv, saying other journalists were fleeing it because it was too dangerous.

Ashton-Cirillo was the first journalist on the scene of the Russian strike on Kyiv on 10 October 2022, which occurred 700 feet (210 m) from where she was staying. Her footage of the aftermath, which showed a dead body in the street, was widely shared on social media subsequently, stoking controversy. She later told Tatiana Vorozhko of Voice of America that she did not expect the controversy, as dead bodies had become routine for her in Kharkiv.

Ashton-Cirillo was already prepared to enlist in the AFU by the time of the missile strike on Kyiv, and sought enlistment at a recruitment station shortly thereafter; on 12 October 2022 she announced by tweet that she had entered the AFU as a senior combat medic. She then resigned as a correspondent at LGBTQ Nation. She has said that, "as a country girl from the [American] South" she "know[s] how to shoot", and that she had previous training in medicine. Her colonel determined that her transgender status was not an issue, and she passed the standard physical exam. She completed her combat medic training on 27 October. She is a member of the Noman Çelebicihan Battalion. According to Ashton-Cirillo and journalist Ayder Muzhdabaev (the latter writing in a blog post with Ukrainska Pravda), the Crimean Tatar unit is led by Lenur Islyamov [uk; ru].

In mid–December 2022 Ashton-Cirillo met with members of the United States Congress, including Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), as well as lawmakers' aides, activists, and non-governmental organization employees. Invoking her background as an anlyst, she argued on behalf of Ukraine that continued military aid to the country would have a high return on investment. She further invited members of the government to come to Ukraine and see the weapons in action.

Ashton-Cirillo drew national media attention in 2021 when she released records of conversations from her time working with Republican candidates, documenting efforts to "get the Proud Boys out" for a planned "Brooks Brothers Riot" (alluding to the 2000 demonstration) as part of efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 United States presidential election.

By the spring of 2021, Ashton-Cirillo decided to run for Las Vegas City Council as a Democrat under the name Sarah Ashton. She initially planned on running in the second ward against the Republican incumbent, Victoria Seaman. In June, she switched her candidacy to the sixth ward, challenging Michele Fiore, also a Republican. Ashton-Cirillo told the Current that she had provided the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with "copious amounts" of correspondence between her and Fiore, as part of an ongoing FBI probe into Fiore's campaign finance spending.

In September 2020, Ashton-Cirillo began working as an opposition research operative with Republican candidates in Nevada under the name Sarah Cirillo. She later told the Post and Nevada Current that her initial purpose in switching parties was to conduct research for her book on extremism and help her friend, Nadia Krall, get elected to a local judgeship as a Republican. According to The Daily Beast, Ashton-Cirillo convinced Krall to change her party affiliation from Democratic to Republican in order to pick up endorsements from Ashton-Cirillo's high-profile Republican contacts. Taking on a hard-right, Trumpist persona, Ashton-Cirillo developed ties with Nevada Republicans by attending and hosting rallies organized by prominent party figures. She commented to the Post that her record as a liberal activist was available on the internet, and told the Beast that "these guys were too stupid to look into my progressive politics, because they were so eager to tokenize me". She was open about her transgender status. Some were indifferent to it, while Republican attorney Sigal Chattah saw it as a positive and referred to Ashton-Cirillo as a "unicorn".

Following the 2020 presidential election, Ashton-Cirillo became involved with efforts to bring the Proud Boys to a rally in front of the Clark County election department, part of nationwide efforts to overturn Joe Biden's victory. The day after the election, Ashton-Cirillo received a message from the vice president of McShane LLC, a firm hired by the Republican Party to investigate electoral fraud. In the message, given to the Post in 2021, the McShane vice president said that Republican Congressman Paul Gosar was planning a "Brooks Brothers Riot" in Arizona—referencing the 2000 demonstration by Republican staffers that contributed to George W. Bush's victory—and that Ashton-Cirillo should start planning something similar in Nevada; the McShane vice president said that they should "get the Proud Boys out". This led Ashton-Cirillo to contact a group of far-right activists, at least one of whom was a member of the Proud Boys. The proportion of those wearing Proud Boy colors in the crowd was relatively small, and the protest remained peaceful. Gosar denies having discussed any protests with the McShane vice president.

Through Political.tips, Ashton-Cirillo reported on Nevada-related aspects of BlueLeaks, a set of law enforcement data released by Distributed Denial of Secrets in June 2020. In an article related to BlueLeaks, Ashton-Cirillo leaked texts with her former friend, Sigal Chattah, then a Republican candidate for Nevada Attorney General. In the leaked exchange, Chattah compared incumbent Aaron D. Ford to the leader of Hamas and said he "should be hanging from a fucking crane". Ford is Black, and some saw the remark as racist; Ford refused to debate Chattah, saying "she doesn't respect my dignity as a human". Ashton-Cirillo said that she does not think Chattah is racist nor intended to allude to Ford's race, and that her goal in releasing the texts had been to criticize Chattah's temperament. Ford ultimately won re-election; HuffPost highlighted the leaked texts as a major controversy in the race.

Ashton-Cirillo has said that her transition does not define her, and "is just an added aspect of who I happen to be". She started taking feminizing hormones "on and off" in 2018, before deciding to transition in May 2019 after what she described as a "35-year wait to embrace myself". She later said that she would have died if she had not transitioned. Her transition has included gender-affirming surgery and hair regrowth. She rushed to finish Fair. Right. Just. as she was coming to terms with her gender identity, and rushed to finish it for fear that she would kill herself. After beginning her transition, she removed both the novel and Along the Tracks of Tears from circulation, explaining:

Ashton-Cirillo has said that she began to "hate Russia" after visiting museums in the Baltic states while she was writing a novel, Fair. Right. Just., which she self-published in 2017. When Russia invaded Ukraine in full in February 2022, she traveled to Ukraine with plans to write a book on both the resulting refugee crisis and her past experience with the Syrian refugee crisis.

In 2015, prior to her gender transition, Ashton-Cirillo went to Syrian refugee camps in Turkey to report on the refugee crisis, having been afraid to enter Syria itself. She wrote a book about the experience, Along the Tracks of Tears, but was unhappy with its quality, having been preoccupied with concerns about whether the people she traveled with would have accepted her if they knew she was a trans woman.

Ashton-Cirillo does not speak Ukrainian, but communicates with fellow soldiers in English, Spanish, or German, or through Google Translate. In an interview with Croatian TV channel N1 two and a half weeks into her enlistment, she proclaimed, as she had before, that "Ukraine has already won" and called for a return to the 1991 borders. She said that she has been issued an AK-74 in addition to her equipment as a medic and that she would use it to suppress enemy fire. She told the Blade that she had won praise in her unit after Russian state media featured footage of her firing a machine gun and vowing to retake Crimea.

Sarah Ashton-Cirillo (born 1977), also known as Sarah Ashton and Sarah Cirillo, is an American journalist who enlisted as a combat medic in the Armed Forces of Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian War, having previously worked as a war correspondent in that conflict. A self-described "recovering political operative" from Las Vegas, Nevada, she was active in Nevada politics from 2020 to 2021, including an abortive run for Las Vegas City Council.

Ashton-Cirillo was born in 1977 in North Florida. According to her byline with the Independent, she has lived in Las Vegas since 2004; according to the Current she "established residency [there] in 2016 to be closer to" her ex-wife and child. She has said her friends and family support her work in Ukraine but "don't necessarily understand what's happening". She has previously been a real estate analyst, a poker player, and the communications director at a healthcare company.