“Time doesn’t heal,” say the war widows of Ukraine
When Olga Slyshyk’s husband, Mykhailo, a military engineer operating on the front lines in eastern Ukraine, failed to contact her on her birthday in January of this year, she started to fear the worst.The 40-year-old educated lawyer frequently went offline for days at a time, but Slyshyk knew he would get in touch on January 14 if he was still alive and healthy.
“I was certain he would reach out to me or find another way to congratulate me. She said to AFP in Kyiv while dressed in all black and clutching her 2-year-old son Viktor, “But I had a very awful dream and I immediately knew something was wrong.
“I learned that he had passed away on January 15.”
Slyshyk is one of a rising number of women who have been made widows by Russian soldiers more than a year after Moscow invaded, and she is now forced to weigh the cost of Ukraine’s will to hold out and repel Moscow’s invasion.
Although neither side has provided the precise number of soldiers dead, recently leaked US intelligence papers indicate that up to 17,500 Ukrainian soldiers may have perished.
After her husband was killed defending Soledar in the eastern Donetsk region, Slyshyk claimed she joined a social media club for war widows, but since then its membership had doubled.
“You just get used to it,”
In order to convince the next of kin that their loved ones’ sacrifice had not been in vain, President Volodymyr Zelensky hosted widows and their children last August at an honors ceremony.
They will fight continuously. He greeted the grieving women and their children one by one and added, “But they live on in the memories of their families.
Slyshyk, 30, who was born in Mariupol, a port city that was besieged and taken by Russian forces last spring, claimed that she frequently brings up the memory of her murdered husband.Every single time. both within and out loud. I’ll cry out in anger while struggling to open a tin can, “Misha, I’m not even able to do this,” and then it will magically open.
Daria Mazur, 41, said that she first found out about her husband’s passing in 2014 after seeing gruesome images of his mutilated corpse that were aired on Russian media following severe clashes with separatists backed by the Kremlin.
He died while leaving Ilovaisk, a notorious and expensive battleground for Ukraine in which hundreds died as Kyiv troops withdrew in the face of advancing pro-Russian forces in August of that year.
Time is not a healer. You simply adjust to it. You acquiesce. You become accustomed to it. And that suffering simply becomes a part of you,” she told AFP in her Kyiv kitchen, alongside to photos of her husband grinning while holding their child.
She said her final conversations with her husband, Pavlo, who was 30 when he was killed, betrayed a sense of foreboding. He knew the situation was precarious.
‘Please promise me that no matter what happens to me, you will be happy,’ he said,’ she said to AFP.
“These guys are giving their lives so we can live on,” she continued, alluding to Ukrainian service members now engaged in combat. “I need you by my side.”
The same organization that Slyshyk joined, “We Have to Live,” assists widows, and it was precisely this urge to continue that drove Oksana Borkun, a widow who had lost her husband to the Russian invasion.
While the government provides both financial and psychological support, Borkun said she wants to take things a step further.
“The girls face a huge amount of pain. You can say it’s possible to go crazy from it. Life is going on around you, and you want to talk to those who understand.”
