Bluesky

Kyiv—In a quiet boutique tucked off Velyka Zhytomyrska Street, Yulia Kolesnikova threads yarn into itself, her needles clinking together with each stitch. It is her unseen accompaniment to a famous photograph. In the photo, Maksym Kolesnikov, her husband, has just been released from Russian captivity, and he is holding an apple, which he regards with awe. It’s his first piece of fresh fruit in a year.

Kolesnikov was mobilized on February 24, 2022, the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion, and taken captive within weeks. Nearly a year passed before his wife received a call from an unknown number. It was Kolesnikov, on a journalist’s phone, telling her he had just crossed back into the country. Their reunion happened shortly thereafter.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope waits 20 years for her husband Odysseus to come home from fighting in the Trojan War. Under pressure to remarry, she fends off suitors by saying she will choose one once she has finished a burial shroud for Odysseus’s father. By day, she weaves. By night, she undoes her own work.

Kolesnikova has jet-black hair and a small rose tattooed on her wrist. She is, in some sense, a modern-day Penelope, using yarn to survive the uncertainty of waiting. We met at her boutique, Aimee Studio, in November, as rumors of a potential peace deal swirled around the city. She was wearing a gray sweater she knitted by hand—the first piece she kept for herself. Behind her was a colorful array of clothes and wool.

When Kolesnikova started knitting in 2020, she was making three to four sweaters a month. “It’s therapeutic work,” she said. “Like using prayer beads.”

The practice of knitting, coupled with the challenges of growing her business, buoyed Kolesnikova in the early days of the war. She credits knitting for why her husband didn’t return home to a “broken woman” but a resourceful one.

As war spreads around the globe, countries have turned to Ukraine for lessons about weapons and tactics. But more emotional knowledge has accumulated as well. Ukrainians, against their will, are learning to endure long-standing conflict and widespread loss. To cope, people rely on rituals of grief and survival, some akin to Kolesnikova’s knitting practice, others akin to Penelope’s unweaving: a staunch refusal to give up hope.

The bad news arrived on his birthday. Months after the Russian invasion, Svitlana Merkulova’s only son, Yevhen Zakoliozhunyi, was sent east. The last time they spoke was full of laughter, Merkulova said. In mid-August, Zakoliozhunyi—a soldier with the call sign Cheshire, a reference to his smile—told his mother he’d be out of comms for five to seven days.

“I was worried,” she told me. “Every day, every hour, every second, I slept with my phone in my hand.” By his birthday, September 7, she still hadn’t heard from him. She decided to call him at the time of his birth, but there was no answer. Later that day, she learned he’d been missing since August 18. “At that moment, the world collapsed for me,” she said. She went outside and shouted until an ambulance came.

I visited Merkulova in a basement office of the Red Cross in Kyiv. The room was gray, the same color of the hoodie she was wearing and the handkerchief she folded and unfolded as we spoke. When she cried, her whole body shook. The loss of her son manifested physically, she said. Her hair started falling out. She lost nearly 30 pounds in six months. At one point, she scratched her belly so hard it bruised.

Days later, she invited me into her apartment, which is filled with photographs of Zakoliozhunyi, alongside gifts she plans to give him when he returns: a tea set with red poppies, a shirt to serve as his first change of clothes, new bed linens, a finished paint-by-numbers. On her son’s next birthday, Merkulova went for a walk through the shops, imagining he was with her. When the tears came, she hid between stalls to wipe them away. Then she kept walking.

Psychology books are piled on Merkulova’s dresser. She copes, in part, by helping others also dealing with ambiguous loss. She has a tattoo on her left collarbone, above her heart, in her son’s handwriting. It reads: “Mommy, I love you.” Uma, a small dog born months after the invasion, helps calm her during nightly attacks.

“One day, I was lying in bed,” she told me. “I had this feeling suddenly that I was dying. I wasn’t frightened. I kind of wished that everything would finish finally. But then I had a thought: ‘Who will take care of Uma?’” The attacks are even more frightening, she added, because of a persistent question in her motherly mind: “Who will search for him if I die?”

In a suburb on the other side of Kyiv, Viktoria Moiseenko has no son to search for, only a grave to visit. She was in line at the drugstore, waiting to pick up a sedative for anxiety, when her son’s fiancée called to say their house had been shelled. It was the fourth day of the war. Anton—described by his mother as adventurous, humorous, and seemingly invincible—had proposed to his girlfriend just two weeks earlier.

When the house was first hit, his fiancée couldn’t find him. But then she saw him lying on the ground, bleeding from his ears. He died in her arms on the way to the hospital. The day he was killed—“the tragedy,” Moiseenko calls it—so were three other relatives of hers. She pulled out a laptop and showed me security footage from the day. Like so many, she has a digital footprint of destruction. What I recall from the scene is not the house in ruins but Moiseenko’s wails as she encountered it.

Anton was buried by a funeral agency. When the time came for cremation, he was #211 on the list. After his death, Moiseenko considered leaving Kyiv, but she is the primary caregiver for her mother, who had a stroke. “I imagined I would be playing with my grandchildren now, but I am alone,” she told me.

Her husband, who’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, was institutionalized after Anton’s death. “He was my partner and best friend for 36 years,” she said, as she scrolled through old photographs of them together. Then she played a video, a more recent one, in which her husband is crying. She asks him what’s wrong, but he doesn’t know.

Moiseenko visits her son’s grave often, but there is no headstone. She cannot afford one. Mourning, like so much else during war, must be adjusted to what is possible. It happens alongside financial strain, daily obligations, and the ongoing demands of survival. Moiseenko told me her story in the back room of a café near her apartment during a blackout. Above her head was a clock shaped like Ukraine.

A grave with no headstone is perhaps an apt metaphor for grief: It is never finished, especially in a place where loss has become so widespread. Last year, Ukraine saw its highest number of verified civilian casualties since the start of the invasion. A recent estimate puts the war’s total body count at 600,000 Ukrainians.

Cemeteries across the country have added new sections for fallen soldiers, with many running out of room. At a cemetery about 20 minutes from the apartment I rented in Kyiv, a gray dumpster overflowed with flowers. My visit came during a downpour. Nearby, two crows sat on a gravestone, then flew away.

Since the war started, death is everywhere. “Death has entered my life and become as inevitable a part of it as paying for groceries with a smartphone,” Maryna Stepanska, a Ukrainian filmmaker, writes in We Who Have Changed. Sasha Nekipelova, a death doula, was living under Russian occupation in 2022. “It was this feeling that death is somewhere nearby,” she told me. “That it’s breathing somewhere near.”

But as death becomes omnipresent and the war unravels countless lives, people are weaving a new collective fabric—a kind of communal burial shroud, comprised of varied, intentional acts of remembrance and survival.

Haiane Avakian is one of the people forming Ukraine’s new collective memory. A journalist from Bahkmut, where one of the bloodiest battles of the war took place, she cofounded the Ukraine Memorial Platform. We spoke in a room full of video equipment, overlooking the neighborhood of Podil. No war has been more digitized and documented than the war in Ukraine, she told me. It’s a testing ground not just for new weapons but new memorialization practices as well.

Run by a small team, the Ukraine Memorial Platform is the largest digital platform dedicated to memorialization, publishing more than 250 stories each month about people who have died. In the process, they’ve built an archive of over 11,000 martyrs, while also creating documentaries and public art installations. Most memorialization efforts have been spontaneous, Avakian said, because Ukraine is still in the deep stages of loss. It’s important to give people the space to live through it, she said.

To that end, emerging efforts are separate from the state. “The state can’t comprehend the scale of the memorialization we need,” she said. “And the state has lots of other problems—like defending our sovereignty and independence.”

Many undertaking memorialization efforts are consciously rejecting Soviet traditions, which have ties to the aggressor. To that end, Avakian cited people’s use of white stone and Cossack-style crosses as opposed to Soviet-style black granite.

For historian Oksana Dovgopolova, though, even white stone feels too fixed: not quite loose enough for the work of weaving new memory. Dovgopolova distinguished between what she calls strategic commemoration, formal memorials that can only be built once the war has ended, and tactical commemoration, which is an immediate response to collective suffering. The provisional acts of the latter may one day be folded into state or museum collections. But for now, they act as individual gestures—stitches, even—which resist the finality of a monument set in stone. Finality would be misleading, in part because grief is abstract and nonlinear, and in part because the war has yet to end.

Imet the writer Oleksandr Mykhed at a bookstore on his lunch break. Mykhed joined the military immediately after the invasion and began to write The Language of War, a book that is fragmented, full of rage and mourning. In it, he connects the shattering of his personal life to the shattering of a generation to the shattering of a nation. The fragment of a shell lodged in the wall of his parent’s apartment in Bucha, another site of mass atrocity, has become a fragment lodged in him.

In the chapter “Requiem for Tarantino,” written to honor Viktor Onysko, a filmmaker and friend whose death, in Mykhed’s words, pierced his heart, he writes: “Behind each statistic is a person, their history and their unlived future. We were young. We loved. We laughed. We cried. We hated with all our hearts. The best became heroes.”

“It is not normal, for any writer from my generation to know how to write requiems and obituaries for friends and fellow writers,” Mykhed told The Guardian. “But I know how to do that.”

Writing, for Mykhed, is a kind of therapy, one that supports individual survival and the creation of a new collective memory. As the world changes, so does language—though some horrors lie beyond it. After four years of attacks, Mykhed said, writing is becoming more difficult. War clouds any sense of the future. No one knows where in the story we are; many think the war is in its third act, but Mykhed believes it is only the first. Regardless, he said, it is important to keep documenting, especially as the world seems to lose interest in the war, even though Russian aggression is creeping west.

“Memory is full of darkness,” Mykhed told me. “From the distance of time, it is impossible for one separate mind to grab it. It has to be a collected approach, to create multifaceted optics about what’s happening.” Or, as he wrote in The Language of War: “No consciousness could endure all of it.” Together, though, each testimony becomes a string pulled tight against the possibility of forgetting.

In her studio in Kyiv, the artist Yeva Kafidova speaks instead of the physicality of forgetting. A lit candle flickers on the desk between us. In 2022, she dyed a piece of her hair white. That year, her grandfather died. It was also the last time she saw her father; her whole family returned to Russia at the start of the war. By 2024, she noticed the white hair had almost grown out.

“My hair does not remember them,” she said. “I never felt time so much. I was looking at the years in my hands.” The result? An acrylic piece called hair? In the foreground, a figure pulls at several long, intermittent strands. In the background, faded drawings evoke the passage of time.

Kafidova usually hates art about war and politics. “It’s useless,” she explained, citing Lebanese artist Walid Raad as an outlier in this regard. But the war has seeped into her work, nonetheless. When the full-scale invasion began, she was back home in Nova Kakhovka, a town in the Kherson region that remains under Russian occupation. To cope, she began drawing compulsively, and she realized that needed to keep making art through the war. “I was alone in my home. I saw the rockets falling and I was like, OK. So that’s the war. It is never going to end. And I am not waiting for the end.”

Once back in Kyiv, she made projects like Will and Freedom and My Waters. Both use labor-intensive, physically demanding materials—hand-cut glitter, metal engravings—to mirror the slow, painful restructuring of perception. You can’t stop change, like you can’t stop water, she told me in reference to the latter piece, which consists of four large metal reliefs, each representing a significant body of water from her life.

About a year into the war, a hydroelectric dam in Nova Kakhovka was bombed. Kafidova began to see art about that attack and its ecological impacts. “I knew these people [had] never been to my home,” she told me. But she is not ready to make art about the attacks on her hometown yet: “I just need a lot more time to process it.”

Anna Solovei, another artist, crossed her arms as she spoke, as if she was hugging herself. She had red streaks in her black hair, which fell just past her shoulders. Less than three minutes into our conversation, her blue-gray eyes were filled with tears. “I’ll never stop crying,” she told me as patrons exited and entered the shop we were in, the door chiming with each pass.

Solovei, who plays piano and banduro, met her on-again, off-again boyfriend Vlad two weeks before the start of the invasion. “When you meet your soul mate, you know,” she explained. When the war began, they left Kyiv and began traveling around Europe, not realizing that Vlad, who was from Belarus, wouldn’t be able to reenter.

Eventually, Solovei decided she had to go back to Ukraine without Vlad. It wasn’t until the summer 2023 that he was able to join the Belarusian volunteer corps and return. They saw each other one last time and broke up. She told me she thought they would end up together anyway. They planned to meet again in Paris in 2026. But in October of 2023, Vlad was killed in a combat mission.

“All the music that I’m writing is dedicated to him,” she said, especially two songs in particular: “come to me in a dream” and “meeting in a dream.” The first begins with a gentle piano melody, before drums and bass enter and the tempo accelerates. For Solovei, it mirrors the moment she learned Vlad had died. “I had anger,” she told me. At the end, the music quiets to just a few notes. She thinks of them as a commemoration.

The second song, which includes saxophone, is about the life they shared. “There are some notes of joy,” she said. “We need to continue to live, and to keep the memories about him.” Music is a way of doing both. As a form, it is particularly well-suited to communicating the emotional weight and complexity of grief. It can remind us that survival is impossible, or at least incomplete, without an acknowledgment of what’s been lost along the way.

Most of the music Solovei has made was created during the war. Did losing Vlad change its mood, make it darker? No. “Sometimes my music is more optimistic and bright,” she said. “The worst already happened.”