Amid War and Grief, Kyiv Caretaker Preserves Memory of Ukraine’s Fallen Soldiers

KYIV — What started with a few Ukrainian flags staked in the grass at Maidan, or Independence Square, has turned into a sprawling repository for a country’s grief, with flowerbeds dedicated to individual battalions, duvet-sized flags draped in the firs and hard-packed trails winding through it all.

Four years into a war that shows no end in sight, Natalia Klymiuk again took the metro eight stops to tend to the memorial that never stopped growing. Russia’s full-scale invasion has officially entered its fifth year — a grim milestone marked by visiting dignitaries, including senior European officials, military commanders, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Klymiuk’s volunteer badge wasn’t enough to gain her access to the anniversary proceedings, so she waited across Khreshchatyk Street for the procession to leave.

She couldn’t see much. But beyond the wall of security vehicles, the officials stood in a line of black winter coats, red votive candles in hand. They took in the portraits of fallen soldiers, standing in the snow like headstones, then placed the candles nearby.

“We cherish the memory of … those who gave their most precious thing for a free Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “And we will definitely preserve what they fought for.”

Finally, they left. It was around 11 a.m.

Klymiuk was now hours behind schedule.

She snapped on yellow gloves and unfurled a trash bag, dragging it behind her through puddles of snowmelt. She moved in quick, short bursts, snatching wilted carnations and soggy roses off the unsanctioned memorial, then flicking them into the trash bag.

The 52-year-old former psychologist has been caretaking the monument since the spring of 2022, when an American named Ryan Routh — now infamous for his 2024 assassination attempt on President Donald Trump on a Florida golf course — pitched a tent on the lawn near the Tchaikovsky Academy of Music with a poster: “My girlfriend was killed by Putin. If you know someone who was killed by Putin, put up a flag.”

A few flags, inked with the ages and call signs of fallen soldiers, turned into thousands. Klymiuk felt like she had no choice but to help. She’d been volunteering for over a decade, since the Maidan Revolution in 2014. So she kept showing up, taking the metro an hour each way from her home on Kyiv’s Left Bank. Days turned into weeks and then years. Though another woman, Tetyana Prantenko, also helps, Klymiuk and her partner, Oleg Karas, have become known as the memorial’s main caretakers. Visitors recognize Klymiuk by her hair, dyed red and scraped into pigtails.

“You see how all the flowers are damp and wet?” Klymiuk said, pointing at another limp bouquet — the previous day’s sorrows becoming today’s task. “I wanted to clean it up yesterday, but I didn’t have a chance.”

***

She darted ahead with her trash bag.

Pausing, she plucked slivers of shattered glass from the snow. Though the coldest winter in more than a decade — exacerbated by Russia’s repeated assault on Ukraine’s energy system — had left her without heat or power at home, she was mostly worried about the photo frames, some of which were shattered by subzero temperatures.

The pictures inside were warped and weathered, only the outlines of faces left. She wanted to find replacements before the men faded entirely.

She and Karas did a little of everything. While municipal workers mostly kept to the sidewalks, sweeping the pavement clean, the couple repaired broken flags with electrical tape, sprayed pesticides on the grass, raked the leaves in the fall, and carved paths through others’ grief.

In his backpack, Karas kept a pre-packaged lunch, trash bags, permanent markers, zip ties, two-sided tape, a screw driver, a box cutter, a hammer and Ukrainian flags and braided ribbons, both of which he sold. He said he donated the money to the military to buy drones and a hospital in Kyiv that treats wounded soldiers.

“We arrive at 8 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m.,” he said. “We take off maybe one weekend a year, just to sleep.”

Spotting a photojournalist with her lens raised, Klymiuk darted through the maze of flags, down a path of beaten-down snow, to confront her. She didn’t like attention and didn’t want photos taken while she was cleaning. She asked her to focus on the monument.

Peeling off her yellow gloves to reveal a pale manicure, Klymiuk set off to continue her rounds. She hadn’t gone far when she stumbled upon a woman in leather pants, a red handbag slung over her shoulder, looking for a spot to jab two flags into the snow. There was no more empty ground, no place to deposit her pain. Her eyes were wet with tears.

Klymiuk stopped and asked if she needed assistance. If she knew the men’s brigades, she could direct her there. Or if they were foreign fighters, Klymiuk could walk her to the proper countries’ locations. Even though she got lost here sometimes, she still knew the memorial better than anyone else.

“Don’t just put the flags just anywhere,” she warned. “You’ll lose them.”

The woman, Yulia Bloshchuk, 30, thanked her. From Kyiv, she wanted to honor two friends — Andrii Bozhko and Yuriy Felipenko — who’d made the decision to fight for her freedom at the cost of their lives. Andrii was a classmate. Yuriy was a former colleague from the film industry.

“I can’t remember the life we once had,” she said.

***

Klymiuk doesn’t want to talk about this on the anniversary, but somewhere in the sea of faces and flags is one she knows well.

Her nephew.

She’s talked about it in interviews with other journalists. Oleksandr was killed in January 2023 in Ukraine’s Donetsk region — the white-hot center of ongoing, American-led peace talks about how to end the war and what Ukraine should sacrifice to Russia’s maximalist demands. Zelensky told reporters he wished he could bring Trump here, to this memorial, to see Ukrainian suffering for himself.

“Only then can one truly understand what this war is really about,” Zelensky said.

Klymiuk doesn’t bring Oleksandr up; her partner does. Before Karas can share any more details, Klymiuk has yelled at him to get back to work.

A woman, unwrapping a metal-engraved portrait of her son from a sleeve of bubble wrap, needs him to hammer a stake into the frozen ground. Karas chips away at the snow with a shovel to no avail. Klymiuk hands him an axe, the sales sticker peeling off the handle.

“He’s the muscle here,” she jokes.

But still the stake won’t go in. The woman is distraught.

On the sidewalk, film crews are setting up their cameras for the day. A man in military green lights a candle. A gust of wind sends the flags rippling, and on Khreshchatyk Street, traffic whooshes by.

What can be made of four years of grief?

This portrait.

A tiny Christmas tree, strung with pine cones and silver bells. A bucket of orange carnations. Picture frames supported by metal kabob skewers. Flags — small and large, for individuals and brigades and countries, some new and others faded — obscuring the horizon.

A take-away mug of a drunken cherry cocktail. A plastic-wrapped croissant and a can of French beer. A plush cat in a pink shirt. A string of paper angels, strung from a tree. A stem of blooming cotton. Colorfully-wrapped chocolates. A yellow plastic bracelet. All these talismans left behind.

And a memory of a nephew that can’t be touched.

Lizzie Johnson is the former Ukraine correspondent at The Washington Post, currently based in Kyiv. Serhii Korolchuk is a local producer in Kyiv.