Zakharova was born on 12 July 1920 in the village of Delgey, Yakutsk Oblast, located within the present-day Olyokminsky district of Sakha; she had seven siblings.

[1][2] Vera and her friends heard the news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union over the radio while playing a game of volleyball.

Seeing her brothers drafted, Vera wished to join the war effort, so she attended nursing courses and was almost deployed, but she was turned away in Irkutsk.

Allegedly their father, who was ill with tuberculosis, expressed concerns about her brother's inability to speak Russian being a problem on the front.

That, along with allegations that he expressed sympathies for the tsarist government, led to his subsequent arrest and execution under Article 58 as an "enemy of the people".

Eventually in February 1944 she along with two of her Russian friends from the Yakutsk aeroclub, Yelena Dvoryankina and Anna Remennikova, who were also parachute instructors, approached a recruiter requesting to be sent to the front and were accepted.

The regimental commander, Nikolai Petrov, who was piloting one of the planes shot down, managed to make an emergency landing in a deserted area, and was rescued by Red Army infantry.

Several then proceeded to grab Vera, tearing off her belt with her pistol and her helmet, releasing her black hair over her face to the shock of onlooking troops, who yelled out "Frau", surprised that the pilot they found was a woman.

At the prison camp she was frequently asked by other inmates where she was from, and resigned to answering simply "Russia" since few had heard of Yakutia or knew where it was.

She continued to fly missions on the Po-2, totally 180 sorties by the end of the war, after which she carved "Zakharova from Yakutsk" on the walls of the Reichstag, having reached Berlin.