Mother’s Day in wartime is not a holiday. It is an endurance test.
That is the quiet truth running beneath everything said and sung at a recent gathering of Ukrainian women brought together by the “Horizon of Hope” project — mothers, wives, sisters, daughters — all of them waiting. Waiting for a son missing for nearly four years. Waiting for a husband who vanished in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion. Waiting for word, for a phone call, for the one-in-a-million miracle that, as one woman noted, actually happened: a defender came home in a recent exchange — the same man his family had buried in 2023.
They held onto that story like a lifeline.
“Horizon of Hope” is not a grief support group, though grief is everywhere in it. It is something harder to name — part cultural project, part collective act of resistance, part documentation of what it costs to be a Ukrainian woman in the fourth year of this war.
The project brought together dozens of women from across the country who have lost loved ones — killed, captured, or simply gone, their files stamped missing in action, a designation that is, as one participant put it, its own particular horror. Many prisoners, she explained, are officially classified as missing. That bureaucratic limbo is not an administrative inconvenience. It is a sustained psychological wound.
With the help of an experienced ethnographer, the participants dressed in the imagery of traditional Ukrainian noblewomen, moving through space and time in embroidered national dress. The photographs broke records. But the photographs were not the point.
“It comes from within,” one woman said. “From deep in the roots. A return to one’s own lineage.”
The women described what the project did for them in terms that are both modest and devastating.
I feel I’ve started living again after these projects.
I’ve become more resilient. Wiser. I’ve gained more experience.
These non-traditional rehabilitative activities — they bring you back to life. They gently shake you loose.
One participant said that what has become an absolute remedy for her is the work being done by civil society organizations — the communication between mothers and wives like herself. “It gives strength,” she said. “Today I feel the support of these women. And they feel mine.”
That exchange of strength is not incidental to the project. It is the project. Because all of these women are, as one observer noted plainly, in a state of waiting — and waiting, she said, is the most difficult period in a human life. The work of “Horizon of Hope” is to give women enduring that wait a way to carry it through creativity, through culture, through the act of being seen.
The name is intentional and precise.
“Horizon of Hope is not a destination to be reached,” the project’s narration states. “It is a line that recedes as you draw near. But it is precisely this that compels us to move forward. And as long as women hold onto faith, memory, and love — the journey continues.”
That is not a consolation. It is a definition of what it means to keep going when keeping going is all you have.
At the gathering, a poet named Diana read two poems. The first was about dreaming of her grandmother’s cottage — the warm bread on the table, the gray cat in the corner, her mother’s arms around her, a world before fire. The earth there, she said, has since mingled with fire. She carries the memory of that place because it is what holds her together.
In times when my eyes burn with pain, when everything simply falls apart, I carry, with faith, hope, and love, my grief-worn self into that dream.
The second poem was for the mothers watching from the heavens — the ones loved imperfectly, the ones understood too late.
Forgive me for not embracing you often enough, for arguing like a small child. You carried the whole world on your shoulders.
She ended with a line that landed in the room like something true:
Set all your worries aside until tomorrow. Today — just call your mother.
The testimonies from the other women were shorter and harder.
My son went missing. It will soon be four years.
My husband disappeared in 2022. The beginning of the full-scale invasion.
I am the mother of a missing soldier. He is my only child. I have a 1% chance that he is still alive.
As long as there is no confirmation of death, one has no right to believe the worst. We must give them hope — not for ourselves, but for them.
One woman said that by killing her child, the enemy thought he would destroy her too. He miscalculated. We are a brave Ukrainian nation, she said. And today, demonstrating my resilience even in such unconditional grief, I want to show that we stand — we will be reborn.
She spoke of a defender returned from an exchange — a man his family had already buried. One in a million. But it is exactly for such moments that every family holds on.
I believe my son will come home alive. I will believe it until the very end.
After Diana finished, another speaker rose and offered a blessing in the register of someone who has said it many times and means it every time:
May God keep our mothers, and our fate, and everyone in this country. We will certainly prevail, we will endure. We will do it all. May God always be with us — with faith in our hearts and love in our souls.
Glory to Ukraine.
The gathering ended. The women dispersed back into the waiting.
“Horizon of Hope” continues its work — documenting, connecting, bearing witness. Because, as one of the women said, this is what they are doing every day: making sure the world does not forget about their loved ones.
They do not intend to stop.
Chris Sampson is the Editor of NatSecMedia and the host of The Wire Tap, an independent, reader-supported publication from Kyiv. If this work matters to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
