When the Ukraine-Russia war broke out, Ukrainian mothers had two options. Either to stay in the country to support their husbands or partners, or to leave the country for a safer place for their children. Those who left are struggling to cope with the difficulties of being refugees, while those who stayed are fighting for life and death with their children.
Miriam Berger and Heidi Levine / Washington Post
Yuliia Sirenko spent the summer alone in her apartment in the bombed-out city of Kharkiv, her heart pulledin two directions.
September loomed, and she had a decision to make: Stay to keep supporting her husband, Yurii, as he battled Russian troops in the east. Or go west, joining the young daughter she’d taken to safety several months earlier.
Millions of women with children have faced similarly wrenching scenarios since Russia invaded. Many have left the country, becoming refugees with all the immense challenges that entails. Yet for those who stayed put in Ukraine as their husbands or partners fought, there are separate struggles and dangers.
Some mothers have thrown themselves into volunteering and fundraising for their loved ones’ units. Others are consumed by child care, financial worries and family expectations.
“It’s very difficult, because when everyone is scattered around Ukraine, I have to be here and there,” Sirenko, 28, said in early August, sitting in the family’s eerily quiet apartment, where a 6-year-old’s bedroom was still filled with toys. Their building had escaped Russia’s indiscriminate shelling, but most neighbors had fled and hadn’t yet returned.“You live one day at a time.”
After more than half a year of fighting, the social services and networks that once helped to sustain the prewar country of more than 40 million people have largely broken down. NGOs are trying to house and assist newly single, displaced and widowed mothers. Their needs are daunting. And the start of the school year in September brought little respite: Just over half of schools reopened for in-person learning.
“They feel guilty. They feel they cannot complain,” said Kateryna Cherepkha, the president of La Strada Ukraine, a Kyiv-based women’s organization.
Iryna Arziaieva, 42, and her two children now subsist on takeout — something her husband, a health food enthusiast, would never have allowed. But he’s been gone since March.
The engineer turned platoon commander was sent east from the capital. At her lowest point before Oleksandr departed, Arziaieva silently screamed into a rolled-up towel, promising herself the family would escape this nightmare.
“I thought it would be hard for me to stay here,” she said. But after her husband left, she realized the alternative would be worse. So she, 13-year-old Mariia and 15-year-old Illia stayed put in their small apartment in the Kyiv suburb of Vyshneve. “I felt that he needs support — when we are here, when we are always in touch, when we can do something for Ukraine,” she explained.
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