War Changes the Ways Ukraine Commemorates Their Losses

Amid the ongoing atrocities, Ukrainians develop a memory culture resting upon personal involvement and a spirit of common loss and healing. 

In March of 2022, a Russian shell hits a small museum of the famed artist Mariia Prymachenko, eighty kilometers from Kyiv. A local watchman rushes without hesitation to rescue her works from fire that engulfed the building. “We broke the glass and started to take it out. Under fire, under all this,” he told later the journalists of LB.ua. “They were shooting, and we were taking it out, what otherwise we had to do?” 

Just like this man Ukrainians are pulling their memories out of fire every single day. 

Remembering to survive

A lesson history gives to Ukrainians again is that memory begins to evaporate at the moment of occurring. In other words, it is vulnerable and volatile. With a number of losses growing exponentially in the eleventh year of the Russian invasion, Ukraine strives to remember every person and every fragment of life. 

A country suffers a long-lasting effect of colonial appropriation and destruction of its culture and heritage caused during the Soviet and Russian periods. Its artists are still marked as “Russian” ones somewhere in global galleries, and its history, culture and language is positioned by Russia as simply “non-existent.” Being subjected to harsh attacks now, Ukrainians learned that remembering is a key to restoring justice and that memory, broadly speaking, helps them to survive. 

I watch locals taking the effort in memorialization and commemoration in big cities and small communities across the country. It largely diverges in two springs: individual involvement in commemoration and communication of a personal perspective on the war. 

With this war considered to be most documented in real time, memoirs, non-fiction writings and war diaries are emerging in droves. 

While a state is overwhelmed with the grueling war and global politics, there is an increase in what I call a “personal memory agency.” 

Writing the memory 

Today many feel the obligation to tell about their own experience for the future. This is what likely felt the children’s writer Volodymyr Vakylenko in a day before being kidnapped. He buried his war diary (a grid-paper scratchpad) in the garden and told his father to return it to Ukrainians after the liberation of Charkiv oblast. 

A father of two raising an autistic son was tortured and killed by Russian troops; his body was ultimately found in the mass grave in a local forest.

The writer Victoria Amelina was fortunate to dig up the manuscript. At the time, she was working on a book about Ukrainian women documenting the war. Injured in a Russian missile attack on Kramatorsk, Amelina died in hospital on Vakulenko’s birthday in 2023. Their books were completed and published by the closed ones. Her women friends, mainly public intellectuals and writers arrange “coloured” gatherings to commemorate their darling friend. The extended chain of tragedies does not erase the attempts to save memory. For everyone, it is typically felt like the principal obligation. 

Since 2014, books of memories about late heroes published by their families and colleagues have established as a solid genre. Now I am reading them again and again for the Ukrainian Scientists at War project we are running together with the Ukrainian biologist Oleksiy Bolduriev. It focuses on memory and hope amid hopeless losses of our scientists. People we encounter through memoirs are greatly missed in their families and communities. Along with mourning, there is yet something different. Memorial scholarships and classrooms named in honor of . I watch people looking for living memory that provides agency and hope.    

Sharing the memory

In this war, Ukrainians mourn the victims as their own and learn how to support each other. As say Armenians to the loved ones, “I will carry your pain,” tzavt tanem. Participation in rituals of memory, personal, local and nationwide, helps to live with the tragedy. The Ukrainian culture of sharing the good and the tragic with others has been developing since 2014. It stems from the grassroots volunteering movement, extreme experiences of the war and a spirit of common. 

Like any other city today Lviv, the largest westward city and humanitarian hub goes through irreplaceable losses. Its native, the perished Ukrainian paramedic and media professional Iryna Tsybukh, 26, left a lasting impact on memory culture. She was concerned with the country’s practices of commemoration. With her “Honor” project, Tsybukh worked to establish the “Minute of Silence” as a nationwide daily ritual of commemoration.

Her brother Yurii Tsybukh, a Lviv city guide studying architecture, launched the guided memorial tour. In his conversation with Ukrainska Pravda. Zhyttia, Mr. Tsybukh told that this is his way to cope with the loss and explore the personality and contribution of his beloved sister. Many visitors arrive from other cities to pay tribute to her and to honor her memory. Bereaved people, he adds, want to speak about their loved one and be heard. 

People invent new ways of commemoration that provide with a sense of common healing here and now and at the same time focus on the future. In Lviv, I am talking to the professor of tourism Pavlo Romaniv who lost his fellow colleague, senior lieutenant Mykhailo Hamkalo in 2022. Faculty of Lviv National University where Dr. Hamkalo worked and is greatly missed puts a lot of efforts to honor his memory. We are talking in the memorial classroom named after Mykhailo Hamkalo full of posters with tourism, life and love. Amongst many initiatives, Dr. Romaniv tells me, was a three-day memorial tour to Mykhailo’s favorite place in the Carpathians Mountains. It honored a spirit of tourist trips which Hamkalo, an excellent tourism instructor and fan of the Carpathians lived.    

In the capital city of Kyiv, the writer Svitlana Povaliaeva and the activist Taras Ratushnyi lost their both sons Vasyl and Roman to this war. Their youngest boy Roman Ratushnyi was a renowned activist fighting for the green area of Protasiv Yar, the locality in Kyiv amid pressure and threats from big house-builders. Roman perished in Charkiv oblast in 2022. In 2023, the reserve was created there and named after Roman Ratushnyi. His mother and friends maintain a “Protasiv Yar” Festival to commemorate the bright citizen and warrior.  

Commemoration is a complicated issue during the war amid a tough historical background. It showcases a variety of view and ways to preserve diverse memories. Many initiatives reflect the drive to break away from post-totalitarian forms of memory; others indicate aesthetic and even corruption-related confrontations. In Kyiv, for example, it is countering large developers and suppliers of granite, the “cold” material which was widely used for memorialization in the Soviet period. In the city of Ternopil, a family of the late warrior is suing the city to place a different tombstone in the memorial cemetery, Pantheon of Heroes. It goes against the idea of unified tombstones as the symbol of equal honoring. It also speaks of different understanding of memorialization that is natural and requires a sophisticated approach. Sometimes heated, public debates on memorialization occupy a significant place in line with frontline news and international shakings. It is a process of developing the own view on memorialization. 

A primary challenge for memory in Ukraine is the intensity and continuation of trauma. In simple words, there is no chance for society to catch a breath and mourn their lost as new ones are on the way. Supporting each other through individual rituals and local initiatives of commemoration helps people to find the kindred spirits and brings a sense of healing. 

Khrystyna Semeryn PhD is a researcher and freelance writer, author of Ukrainian Scientists at War, focusing on memory politics, Ukrainian culture, gender, trauma, and war. She has held academic positions at the University of Augsburg and visiting fellowships at institutions in Poland and the U.S. She has worked with organizations such as the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation and the House of Europe. Her latest book is The Century of Presence: The Jewish World in Ukrainian Short Fiction (1880s–1930s).

By Khrystyna Semeryn

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