Balalaika

Balalaika, real name Sofia Pavlovna Irinovskaya is the boss of Hotel Moscow's Thai branch in Roanapur. Various people throughout the series derogatorily refer to Balalaika as Fry-Face due to the scar on the right side of her face.

Balalaika is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman with a skinny build but she has big plump breasts with pale skin, a mole under her left eye, and scars on the right side of her body, including her face, neck, bosom, and leg, hence earning the derogatory nickname "Fry-Face." She is 5’11 and her hair is very long and done up in a huge ponytail, going down to the base of her spine. She is usually seen wearing a wine-colored skirt suit with black stockings and black 1-inch heels. Her nails are long and painted pink, and she also wears rose-colored lipstick. Whenever traveling, she wears a Russian military coat draped off her shoulders with a rank insignia of a Soviet Airborne Forces captain. However, she removes it when it is considered polite. She is usually shown smoking a thin Russian cigar, in contrast with the other characters who smoke cigarettes.

Due to Balalaika's leadership during the hellish fighting in Afghanistan, her men look up to her as their superior and will do just about anything upon her orders, with Boris being her right-hand man. She always refers to Boris by the title of "Sergeant" and often refers to her other men by their military rank. As a combat officer, she is a skilled strategist and well-rounded fighter, capable of taking care of herself despite the fact that all of her troopers, including Boris, often worry for her. Although she has shown herself to be rather cynical on occasion, she is also a pragmatic, opportunistic, and professional businesswoman. She frequently employs Dutch and the Lagoon Company because they share a mutual respect and Balalaika trusts Dutch as a discreet man of integrity.

She is also downright ruthless, willing to utilize whatever means to achieve what she wants. As a mafia leader, she has claimed that trust and profit are her concerns, also remarking once that her motivation is to maximize her group's profits and eliminate anyone in the way by any means necessary. On one occasion, Balalaika even admitted that she only lives to bring destruction and dance as long as she can "on the bottom of hell's cauldron." She has no qualms about killing children, although she used to be hesitant to do so during the Soviet-Afghan War because of Afghan children whom she and her men fought in Panjshir.

Balalaika regards herself and her men as soldiers who missed their chance to die in Afghanistan. While some of her actions can be interpreted as attempts to pursue an honorable death in combat for her men, Balalaika's status as a military figure is tempered by her role in the criminal underground. She backed away from engaging with Shane Caxton's American soldiers in combat after Mister Chang reminded her of their unfinished fight. Balalaika opted for a future battle with Chang over a present opportunity to engage the American unit, which she regarded as a foil to her own disgraced Soviet unit, because she wanted to preserve their joint interest to keep the city of Roanapur standing.

She was brought up by her uncle, a general in the Red Army of the USSR. Balalaika's father had presumably either been condemned by the USSR or fled the country. Due to her father's condemned status, she felt that she had to restore her family's honor. Instead of participating in the shooting competition at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Balalaika joined the Soviet Airborne Forces (Vozdushno-Desantnye Vojska; Russian for "air assault troops"), also known as the VDV. During her service, she was a paratrooper and a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. A fine marksman and sniper, she received the nickname "Balalaika" (one of the Soviet army's slang terms for the Dragunov sniper rifle). Balalaika can be easily identified by the various burn scars across her body, which she sustained from being tortured for protecting refugees in Afghanistan, stated by a former soldier of hers in the first light novel.

Her main weapons of choice is usually whatever is available to her but she often uses a pistol and keeps one under her jacket.

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