She is not what we usually mean by armed opposition.

In the first days of Vladimir Putin’s war on her country Kira Rudyk - and her automatic rifle - became a global social media meme.

The MP - a critic of President Volodymyr Zelensky - was one of thousands of Ukrainians to collect a gun to protect herself and her country.

Pictures of the 36-year-old with the weapon summed up how quickly and dangerously the eight-year war had changed.

They also sparked abusive sneering from some in Russia, about her “glamour” poses with her cat, and her Kalashnikov.

It is only now, around 100 days in to this latest and most bloody phase of the conflict, that Ms Rudyk understands how much stress she was under.

She is in Glasgow, safe but struggling with an industrial-sized teapot in the cafe of a city hotel. “It is very weird,” she says after being asked what it is like to be in a land without explosions.

The politician pulls out her smartphone to explain why. It is in a cover emblazoned with the name of the small pro-EU, liberal opposition party she leads, Holos. She scrolls through to an app which sets off an air raid siren when missiles are heading for the Ukrainian capital. She has not disabled the feature outside her country.

“I cannot abandon my people,” she explains, “I have to be with them.” Her mind is still at war, even if her body is in a place of peace.

“This is my first time being away from Ukraine since the war started,” she says, in not quite perfect English. “And I had been in Kiev under the bombarding since day one.

“I thought ‘I am OK’.”

She thought wrong. Her first stop after Ukraine was Poland. There she realised she could not leave the stress behind.

“When I was in Warsaw I was jogging when am ambulance passed. I threw myself on the ground and held my head in my hands.

“It is there, the fear, even though we don’t realise it. That is, like, a scary thing.”

Ms Rudyk is describing the same symptoms as refugees from the fighting. But she is not on the run, she is on a mission.

The politician - who has found a bigger audience abroad since those gun snaps - is making a para-diplomatic tour to drum up support for her country as it struggles for its very existence, its sovereignty, its statehood.

But she is also living proof of Ukraine’s continued pluralism, even under bombardment.

Pro-Kremlin parties may be banned. But Ukraine has not suspended its fledging democratic culture. That might be one of the reasons, say a fair number of outside observers, why it is faring better in the war than some expected: open societies function better in a crisis.

So what is the role of a democratic opposition in war?

The politician admits this is a tough one to answer.

“When the war started we decided to put aside our differences,” she says. “We are trying to be as productive and effective as possible, without criticising too much.”

The Holos leader - she has only been in the Verkhovna Rada for three years - is not a peacetime supporter of Mr Zelensky, the entertainer turned war leader.

“Before the war I had two or three nasty articles prepared about Zelensky. Probably they have to be let go,” she says, meaning dropped. “We are doing most politics behind the scenes. I don’t think Ukrainian people don’t need politics right now. They need a victory in the war. When we are talking about how to rebuild the economy, then it starts getting tricker. Here we have differences of opinions.”

There are, after all, big and difficult decisions to be made in Ukraine. The country is broke. Its main exports are blocked. Putin’s armies are doing an estimated $5 billion worth of damage a week. So far the repair bill is bigger than the value of the Marshall Plan which America used to get western Europe back on its feet after World War Two. US President Joe Biden has pledged cash. But Ukraine does not just need weapons. It needs to be able to make its pension payments. How to handle these crises requires debate.

“Pluralism of thoughts is one of the things we are fighting for,’ Rudyk says, convinced this makes her country stronger. “We are right now trying to find a way that we are able to express our thoughts and concerns but not harm the unity that we have.

“It is hard.

"We know that there is always a seductive thought by the ones in power that ‘we will get rid of the opposition once and for all’.

“Ukraine is getting so much support from the west because we stand for democratic values. That helps keep democratic principles going.”

Most of the news from Ukraine is about the military, including stories, which Ms Rudyk says are accurate but “not systemic” about soldiers on the front line without enough to eat, fighting on a potato a day.

But we hear less about proposed reforms to trade union rights and pensions, that critics say will hammer the poorest in Ukraine.

Mr Rudyk is not drawn on specifics. But she concedes there is controversy. Ukraine is running a monthly deficit of between five and seven billion dollars. The priority, she says, must be the military, but then welfare.

Why is she on the road? The politician is fresh from Davos, the World Economic Forum, where she was ‘taking the temperature” of international opinion. The nations of the global south, she argues, are “on the fence" on the conflict with Russia. But they are beginning to understand that the war is creating a food crisis. Ukraine’s huge grain surpluses are currently in elevators, unable to be exported.

“I don’t think Putin will let the ships out,” she says. And that means the rest of the world, not just Britain and America, will have to make some tough decisions, including on whether to escort grain carriers through the Black Sea.

Mr Putin lost the battle of Kyiv. His armies had to flee from the capital’s suburbs. But Ms Rudyk stresses the war is not over, and that the Russians are slowly but surely eroding Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself.

"Russia underestimated us at the beginning of the war but we should not make the same mistake about them now.

“They are learning and they are moving very strategically. They are destroying our armouries, and facilities to repair weapons, fuel storages, the refineries.

“They are slowly going to destroy our infrastructure and we will get to the point when we don’t have supplies and the whole world is watching saying ‘maybe you should cone to some agreement with Russia?’”

“This is what I heard in Davos. ‘Why don’t you guys give up, do a deal? But wow can we do a deal? Our people are dying there. This is our land. We cannot give it up.”

Like other Ukrainians, Ms Rudyk responds to what she calls ‘stupid questions” with a simple trick. She asks her interlocutors to swap the name “Putin” for “Hitler”. That, she says, changes their tune.

But the politician - who says she is a “nationalist in a good way” - points out that even if Mr Zelensky did a deal, or ceded territory, that would not end the war. Ukrainians in areas affected would just keep fighting. She is not the only one with a gun.

She is also scathing of the lack of strategy by what she - and increasingly others - refers to as the “collective West”. She was visiting Scotland last week as President Biden equivocated about supplying long-range weapons, exactly what Ms Rudyk says her country needs. There were fears Ukraine would target Russia with American rockets.

“The world is saying it is OK for Russians to kill you but it is not OK for you to kill Russians. For my people, it is a painful subject. In 1994 we gave up the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world under the Budapest Memorandum and the US, UK and Russia were the security guarantors of our sovereignty.

“And now they are saying 'we are not giving you weapons because you might hurt Russians’? What is this?”

Would Ukraine promise not to use American missiles to hit Russia? “We would promise the exact opposite,” replies Ms Rudyk “That is how war works.”

Supplies have been slow, bogged down in red tape and logistical hurdles. Getting weapons from the West, smiles Ms Rudyk, is not like ordering a parcel on Amazon Prime.

Her visit to Scotland has purpose. She is trying to build relations with local and national authorities. She met Nicola Sturgeon. It is councils, for example, which provide services to refugees. She has concerns about charitable aid. Well-meaning people have been collecting jumble. But what Ukraine needs, she argues, is construction materials, not warm clothes. She cites an example: in devastated Bucha, the Kyiv region town that was scene of horrific atrocities, citizens cried out for plastic sheeting and wrap to replace shattered windows. That message took time to get through.

Western Europeans have been slow to listen to what Ukrainians have been telling them. And not just on what charity they want.

Ms Rudyk has a theory about why Boris Johnson is so popular in her country. It is because he admitted the West should have acted sooner, when Putin first invaded, eight years ago.

“After 2014 we had the feeling that had that we were standing in a room full of people and were being raped. And everybody is saying ‘Why are you screaming’? Chill out!”

Rape, Ms Rudyk argues, is being used by Putin troops as a weapon of war. That is one reason why she got the gun that made her famous around the world. “I knew what would happen if Russian soldiers got to Kyiv.” She has interviewed the victims of sexual assaults in Bucha. It was, she says, terrifying.

How can Ukrainians become reconciled with Russians after such atrocities? “I don’t care about that,” she says. “I want to kill them. I want to prosecute them.”

Ms Rudyk thinks the West is all over the place on what to do about Mr Putin and his war criminals. But Ukraine, she says, knows what to do. “We have a strategy,’ she says, “our strategy is to fight.”