Ukrainian Mothers at War: ‘Safeguarding Normality While the World Collapses’

Kateryna Yakymowych, 38, Irpin

At the time of speaking to BIRN on May 23, Kateryna was excitedly waiting to fly to Rome the next day to see her five-year-old daughter. This would be only the third time in over a year when the mother and daughter got to see one another.

When Russia invaded in February 2022, Kateryna, her daughter and her mother were living in Irpin, a small town near Kyiv, which made international headlines last year (alongside nearby Bucha) because of the atrocities committed by the Russian military against civilians. Kateryna's family was in Irpin in the first half of March, precisely when those war crimes were being committed.

"The worst is that the child could see and hear everything," Kateryna recounts from Kyiv over a videocall. "Our house was located in such a place that we could see everything that was happening on the streets."

Kateryna says she knew the full-scale war would start a few months before February 24, because she had been volunteering for years in various roles, many of them connected to helping soldiers fighting since 2014 against Russian proxies in the Donbas. She says her contacts in the Ukrainian military had warned her.

Nevertheless, even though all the bags had been packed for Kateryna to send her daughter and mother away, she says her mother simply went into shock when the war erupted, so she could only leave the country, accompanied by her granddaughter, some weeks later, on March 17.

"Separating from my daughter was the hardest decision I ever had to make," Kateryna says. "But I had to do it. I knew personally so many of the boys who were fighting in the war and I just felt I could not abandon them."

When she started volunteering back in 2014, Kateryna...

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