Almost three years after leaving Minneapolis, Colleen Ryan stood half a world away, studying the burnt-out remains of the world’s largest airplane.

Ryan had read about the Antonov AN-225 Mriya. Originally built to transport a spacecraft for the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians viewed it as a symbol of their nation’s resilience. Then came the Russian invasion in 2022 and the battle for Hostomel Airport outside Kyiv, where the plane resided.

On a sunny afternoon last month, Ryan, a 31-year-old former Minneapolis police officer who defiantly quit the force, stood in the foreground of what was left of the Mriya: a crumbling section of fuselage, blue-and-yellow stripes of the Ukrainian flag stretching dimly across the charred exterior.

Seeing its hulking wreckage up close felt surreal, she said. “It is hard to describe just how big this plane was in person,” Ryan said.

She had come to Hostomel to meet with the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine and learn about how the airport’s operations have changed since the invasion. She is one of the few Americans working in Ukraine for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the world’s largest security group, where she has spent a large part of the past three years helping secure the border amid the largest European conflict since World War II.

It’s the second time in recent years Ryan has found herself immersed in a world-altering event.

Ryan quit the Minneapolis Police Department in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the protests and riots that engulfed the city after telling a GQ columnist about systemic problems in the force. Ryan wasn’t named in the article, and her critiques were mostly echoed by state and federal investigations, which documented patterns of racist and illegal behavior. Still, police leadership disciplined Ryan for speaking to the media without permission, costing her a promotion.

Ryan left the department in October 2021, after more than six years as an officer. On her way out, she filed a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights alleging that her former employer discriminated against her because she’s a lesbian who advocated for “women and queer officers” in the workplace.

In an interview with the Star Tribune at the time, Ryan said she endured years of harassment in a misogynistic and homophobic culture. Many of Ryan’s fellow officers turned on her, she said — refusing to partner with her and stalling in response to her calls for backup — when they learned she supported Hillary Clinton, who they perceived as anti-police, and that she participated in the St. Paul’s Women’s March in 2017.

The day of the interview with the Star Tribune in 2021, Ryan had packed her life into a stack of cardboard boxes in preparation to leave the country for a job in Ukraine the next morning.

She didn’t know then that she would be arriving just a few months before the invasion.

Even before falling out with the Minneapolis Police Department, Ryan wanted to go to Eastern Europe.

While working as an officer, she completed her master’s degree at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs; her thesis was on women, peace and security in the Balkans region. When she saw the posting for the OSCE job in spring 2021, she said it sounded like a natural progression from her work in policing.

OSCE employs about 3,500 people — mostly through short-term contracts from 57 countries in North America, Europe and Asia — for work in human rights, conflict prevention, border management and postwar rehabilitation.

When Ryan signed up, the organization was on a special monitoring mission to ensure compliance with the Minsk agreements, which established a cease-fire between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists. By the end of 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin had posted tens of thousands of troops on the Ukraine border.

“We were following the news,” Ryan recalled. “You kind of felt like maybe something was coming.”

In February, the U.S. State Department advised all Americans to evacuate from Ukraine within 72 hours. Ryan remembered racing through Kyiv after midnight, trying to catch one of the last flights out of the country.

Ten days later, Russia invaded. One of the first targets was the strategically located Hostomel Airport. Ryan followed the news from her parents’ home in Texas. After the Russians laid siege, Ukraine launched a counter offensive and retook the airport. The Mriya, the plane whose name translates to “dream,” was destroyed in the fighting.

Shortly after the battles over Hostomel ended, in April 2022, the Minneapolis City Council approved a $133,000 payment to settle Ryan’s human rights complaint.

That winter, she was back in Ukraine, helping people in war-torn Kherson relocate by rail to safer areas, like Mykolaiv and Odesa.

When her contract with OSCE ended, Ryan took a job with Nonviolent Peaceforce, an international nongovernmental organization focused on civilian protection. Over the next few months, she brought Kevlar vests to local volunteers in Kherson and aided in coordination with governmental authorities and other NGOs to help connect social services to those forced to flee their homes and resettle.

Ukraine had changed in the months since she left. She learned to stick to the pavement to avoid land mines and routinely slept in cold air raid shelters. Electricity became an unreliable luxury. She grew accustomed to a life of regular military checkpoints, windows reinforced with sandbags, the sounds of Russian missiles or drones being shot down over Odesa’s port and the sight of anti-tank Czech hedgehogs stacked in the streets, waiting to be used for the next attack.

“I think we take for granted, especially in the U.S., you get to go home and you have power at home, and it’s safe at home,” Ryan said.

“It’s been a couple years of war now, so [Ukrainians] learned to adapt to it,” she continued. “But days go by where you hear air raid sirens every day. Your phone is charged all the time because you don’t know when you’ll lose power or not…It’s a new normal that really shouldn’t be accepted.”

In moments of downtime, she is learning to speak Ukrainian with the help of her colleagues. In exchange, she said, she teaches them about American culture, like the music of Taylor Swift.

Ryan’s second contract with OSCE began in February 2023. Her mission this time entails a project on detecting forgeries and training border officers to spot impostors at crossing points. Over the past 1½ years, she has helped trained 48 Ukrainian border guards to detect forged travel documents, including passports, visas, ID cards and other documents like military conscription orders.

Fraudulent documents have posed an ongoing problem in the region during the war. Border agents find people looking to pass false documents for illegal migration in search of better living conditions, human trafficking, smuggling weapons and acts of terrorism, Maj. Markovskyi Oleksii of the Main Forensic Center of Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service, said in a translated email. Keeping up with the latest forgery techniques is key to national security “not only of Ukraine ... but also of the whole world,” Oleksii said.

Part of that means helping border security agents adopt strategies to identify fake IDs. Which is what brought Ryan to Hostomel Airport and the Mriya in June.

When she arrived, artillery damage and bullet holes pocked the hangar where the plane was housed. A Ukrainian National Guard commander recounted the first days of war and the intense battles that took place there. After retaking the airport from the Russian forces, he said, Ukrainian troops had to clear the tarmac of unexploded bombs, booby traps and the bodies of dead soldiers.

Since the battle, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has promised to rebuild the Mriya.

As the war continues, Ryan said she plans to stay with OSCE for the foreseeable future. She’s applying for a doctorate program, with a dissertation on Ukraine’s women police officers.

Asked how she reflects on her time with Minneapolis police after her years abroad, Ryan said she had no regrets and hopes that speaking out will benefit future female officers who want to change law enforcement culture. She credits her training and experience in Minneapolis with preparing her for what’s to come.

“I’m equipped to go where the trouble is,” Ryan said.