Elena Zelenskaya, the first lady of Ukraine, talks to people outside Ukraine about the different experiences of Ukrainian motherhood in the context of a full-scale war. She says that every Ukrainian mother today is part of the great wall that holds back Russian aggression against the world.
Source: Elena Zelenskaya in an article for The Washington Post
The First Lady believes that right now Ukrainian women are fighting for the survival of the democratic world order, taking on the roles of caregivers, doctors, soldiers and breadwinners.
Zelenskaya told the story of 6-year-old Renat and 10-year-old Varvara from Mariupol. The children were simply taken from their mother when she was captured and deported to an orphanage in Russia.
Their grandmother knocked on every door to bring her grandchildren back on her own. She even crossed the border between Ukraine and Russia to find the children. Although Renat and Varvara's mother returned to Ukraine as part of the prisoner exchange, the grandmother had to wait nine months before she saw her grandchildren again.
More than 19 thousand Ukrainian children are still in Russian captivity. Their families are tormented by uncertainty.
According to the first lady, some mothers managed to turn pain into hope, such as Natalya Makovetskaya, who joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces after her son was killed in battle. And she is not the only one: there are currently more than 60,000 female soldiers in the Ukrainian army, and all of them joined the Ukrainian army voluntarily.
Other mothers take care of children who have lost their parents and home – Tatyana Yurichko, for example, took ten children into her care. She believes that every child deserves to have a family.
But not all stories of Ukrainian mothers are happy. Zelenskaya recalled that two months ago Anna Khaidarzha and Tatyana Kravets were found dead by rescuers after a Russian missile attack on Odessa. The women were killed, covering their babies, 7-month-old Lisa and 4-month-old Timofey, with their bodies. Their older children were left orphans.
One of the most difficult challenges for mothers in Ukraine today is the feeling of helplessness, the inability to protect their children either physically or emotionally, Zelenskaya says.
“Now in Ukraine every mother must prepare for the question: “Mom, are we going to die today?”,” she said.
The First Lady of Ukraine also shared her own “recipe” for being a mother in wartime: to be sincere and remain an example of love and care.
“But my only recipe for being a mother during war is to be sincere and serve as an example of love and care. This is to teach my children the need to care for others because that is why we all hang on throughout the war. We are talking about the hope that the war will remain just an episode in the lives of our children, that after it they will live a normal life in order to erase this trauma,” Zelenskaya said.