The year is 1957, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady of the United States, is at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, on a trip to the Soviet Union. She has come to pay a private visit to Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the legendary Soviet sniper. Roosevelt, however, has a complaint. She refuses to attend the official program planned in her honor and insists on being taken directly to Lyudmila’s address.

Handing the address to her driver, she introduces Lyudmila to her secretary, telling the story of how they first met fifteen years earlier, at the International Students Antifascist Assembly in 1942. Back then, in Washington, Roosevelt had been greeting the Soviet delegation politely, shaking hands with pilots and army officers in the White House. She questioned Nikolai, a party worker, about his achievements in killing the enemy. Then she moved on to Vladimir Pchelintsev, who introduced himself as a sniper.

Roosevelt was enjoying the conversation when a young woman stepped forward and introduced herself as Lyuda Pavlichenko, a second lieutenant and a sniper herself. Surprised, Roosevelt asked how many men she had killed. Lyuda corrected her sharply. They were not men.

They were fascists. Lyuda’s military record had made her a vital propaganda tool for the Soviet Union, a woman paraded worldwide to raise funds for the fight against fascism. When she eventually revealed that she had killed three hundred and nine fascists, Roosevelt and the reporters surrounding her were stunned. Lyuda was suddenly the center of attention, and as the questions came at her, her mind drifted back to where it had all begun.

In 1937, her friend Marsha had run excitedly to the school board outside Kyiv University, scanning the list of students who had passed the entrance examinations. She spotted Lyuda’s name and announced her victory joyfully. Lyuda, however, chose to go home instead of celebrating. Her friends insisted they would be waiting for her right after class.

At home, Lyuda asked her mother for permission to borrow her dress. Her father, Misha, walked in, and Lyuda approached him with the good news, but her father did not seem proud of her achievement. She watched him head for the door and asked when he would be back. He told her not to wait for him for dinner.

Lyuda interrupted him, saying they had already invited the neighbors to celebrate her admission. Her father dismissed the idea, asking what kind of celebration required such importance. The next day, Lyuda met her friends, including a female classmate named Masha, and they planned to celebrate her admission by going to a shooting range. While the girls watched the boys compete, Lyuda suddenly stepped forward and asked the instructor for a bullet.

The boys mocked her decision, but the laughter died when she fired, drilling the target with near-perfect holes. Later, in class, a faculty member entered and called for Lyuda. Her exceptional shooting at the range had not gone unnoticed. She was summoned to the headmaster’s office, where she learned that the Red Army wanted her to enter a sharpshooting program within six months.

At home, Lyuda prepared her things for the training, ignoring her father’s questions about her school program. She was busy with her studies when Masha spent time admiring the sailors she hoped to catch. A librarian interrupted Lyuda, urging her to go to the beach so he could close the library early, and he enlisted Sonia’s help to convince her. At the beach, Masha was hit by a ball, meeting Kolya and Grisha.

Kolya tried to introduce himself to Lyuda, who ignored him. Then Masha pointed out the men playing volleyball, and Lyuda saw Boris, a Jewish doctor, walking toward her. Sonia left them alone, and Boris told Lyuda that Sonia wanted him to propose to her after seeing her in a swimsuit. Lyuda accepted the invitation to dinner at their house to meet his parents, but when she heard of a German attack, she left immediately, thinking about joining the battle.

She attended an opera with Boris, but when he said she was not fit for war, she walked out and rejected him. She left to fight on the Eastern Front following the German invasion. Now, in 1942, Lyuda received a message from Roosevelt offering her a place to stay in the White House. The journalists had given her a nickname: Lady Death.

They knew she had killed a hundred men, and her bravery and intelligence had caught Roosevelt’s attention. Lyuda had joined the army to fight the Germans, enduring tough training under a Comrade Major eager to win the war and rescue captured soldiers. After watching her performance, the major paired her with a grizzled veteran sniper named Makarov. In 1941, the battle against the Germans began.

Lyuda followed the captain’s orders: first, throw the grenade at short range, then fire armor-piercing rounds into the tank’s arrow slit, and finally kill the driver. She asked the captain for a forward flank position to shoot wisely. When the attack came, she moved despite being outnumbered. Makarov witnessed her shoot straight into the driver’s eyes.

She wiped out an entire troop and then passed out. A soldier announced that Lyuda had destroyed the tanks, and the Major General of the 25th Chapaevsk Division presented her with a semi-automatic SVT rifle. The captain taught her how to use it, and as they talked, she asked if he had a wife. Outside, Masha’s voice called her name.

Lyuda reunited with her old classmate, now a nurse engaged to a young pilot named Grisha. Masha spotted Makarov in the tent and asked if he was her boyfriend. Lyuda said he would be soon. While defending the city of Odessa, Lyuda was injured saving a comrade.

She refused to stay in position, kept sniping, and was shot by German troops. Masha treated her wounds. At night, Lyuda dined with Masha and Grisha, who excused themselves, leaving her alone. A man entered the tent and kissed her.

She beat him off, and Makarov saw it. Lyuda followed him outside, only to learn he could not return her affection. He explained that he had lost his family when the Germans invaded. The next day, the Germans attacked Odessa again.

Lyuda was caught in an explosion and passed out. Makarov dragged her to safety at a local hospital, where Boris had volunteered as a military doctor. Back in the present of 1942, Roosevelt taught Lyuda to cook borscht in the White House kitchen. As Lyuda corrected Roosevelt’s pronunciation of the word, the First Lady dropped the pan, and Lyuda panicked.

Roosevelt tried to calm her, asking what had frightened her. In 1941, during the Sevastopol evacuation, Lyuda was recovering from the Odessa explosion, with Boris tending to her. On the ship, German aircraft attacked, shooting at everyone on board. Boris searched for Lyuda, but it was Masha who found her and calmed her down.

Boris approached and warned that it was not safe for her to return to the front. At Sevastopol headquarters, Lyuda approached Ivan to sign her papers, proving she was healthy. As they walked inside, she learned that Makarov had died in battle and that the Soviets were retreating to Sevastopol. She convinced Boris to sign her papers to return to the front lines.

Once back, the captain paired Lyuda with a male sniper named Leonid. Driven by her desire to avenge Makarov’s death, Lyuda wounded enemy soldiers and watched them suffer. Leonid was horrified by her cruelty, warning her that these were not fascists, that she should not kill men this way. Despite the rough start, they developed a close romance as they carried out their missions.

One day, they celebrated a victory in Sevastopol. A fight broke out, and Leonid kissed her after beating a man. They confessed their love for each other. The next day, Masha called them to witness her wedding, and then she revealed the death of her fiancé.

Grisha was gone. Lyuda and Leonid mourned with Masha, toasting his memory. Lyuda told Leonid privately that she wanted a son. He remained silent.

Later, while patrolling a field, Leonid stepped on a mine that triggered a flare. It signaled artillery fire onto their position. They ran, but they could not escape the field. Leonid was killed.

Lyuda carried him and called for help. She woke in a field hospital. Boris told her Leonid had died in the ambush. For the second time, Lyuda had lost a man she loved.

As Boris tried to calm her, the Commander entered and ordered his men to take her for the front. Boris threatened to complain to the General, but the Commander insisted it was an order that Lyuda stand on her feet. Wounded and exhausted, she was ordered to kill a top enemy sniper for Soviet propaganda. The next day, Lyuda practiced for the duel.

Before leaving, she went to the Commander to see the photo of her target. She admitted she was no longer the best sniper and that the military doctor’s report said she was unfit for service. The Commander kept pushing, saying it was also for Leonid. She agreed.

At the location, the duel lasted an entire day. Tired of waiting, Lyuda stepped out of cover, exposing herself completely. She was shot. But in that moment, she pinpointed the sniper’s location and killed him.

She walked toward the enemy and found a picture of him and his wife. Looking at it, she cried, remembering Leonid and their almost wedding. Boris went to the General’s office to report that Lyuda was wounded and traumatized and needed to be evacuated immediately. Sevastopol itself was being evacuated under siege, civilians panicking to get aboard.

The General allowed Lyuda to leave. That night, Boris and Lyuda reached the boat with the civilians. Lyuda realized Boris had given her his papers. She stepped aboard, but only she would escape.

Boris stayed behind to take the next steamer. The defense of Sevastopol lasted over two hundred and fifty days, yet the enemy was still there. No evacuation was organized for the troops and citizens. Only the General and officers from the command were safely evacuated by boats.

Boris, Masha, and countless civilians and soldiers died defending the city. The Germans killed about eighty thousand civilians and soldiers after the battle. In 1942, Lyuda finally made her speech in Chicago. She had tried to embrace her femininity, wearing a dress for her address in New York, but the Soviet propaganda minister refused, telling her she was a Soviet soldier, not a woman.

He forced her back into the Red Army uniform. When she began, she introduced herself by the number of fascists she had killed. To everyone’s astonishment, she made a vital impression on the predominantly male crowd, finishing with a question: “Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long? ” The applause was thunderous.

Lyuda finished her studies at the university and received the Hero of the Soviet Union award, the highest rank. Fifteen years later, Roosevelt planned her visit to Moscow. She finished Lyuda’s story for her secretary, saying that Lyuda had won as a diplomat, a soldier, and a woman.

Roosevelt attended the opera with Lyuda and her son, assuming the boy was Leonid’s child.