“That I was helping others saved me from falling into the abyss of grief,” says the co-founder of a support group.
On New Year’s morning 2024, Yaryna Herashchenko woke up to a text from a friend: “Yaryna, hang in there, sweetheart, your boy is dead.” She later learned that Rostyslav, her partner, had died on 28 December 2023, in Avdiivka, a city in eastern Ukraine now under Russian control.
Yaryna and Rostyslav had met just 14 months earlier during a drone training course. “Somehow, we immediately knew we wanted to be together,” says 32-year-old Yaryna. Rostyslav had served four years in a volunteer militia and returned to the front in 2022 as a sniper. He participated in the battle of Kyiv, after which he was stationed in Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeast Ukraine, situated on the banks of the Dnipro River.
For many Ukrainians, the war is not just fought on battlefields, but also in the quiet spaces of homes and hearts, where grief, loss, and uncertainty shape daily life. The World Health Organization reports that more than two-thirds of Ukrainians have seen their health decline since the start of the war, with mental health issues among the most pressing concerns. For many families, grief has become a constant companion. A 2024 study found that 54% of Ukrainians, including refugees, show signs of PTSD, while 21% experience severe anxiety and 18% report high levels of stress.
Despite these widespread challenges, access to professional mental health care remains limited. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and trained counselors are concentrated in large cities, leaving many conflict-affected regions underserved.
“So many people are experiencing loss, and there are too few mental health professionals to support them,” says Yaryna.
Living Through Loss
Before the war, Yaryna was a student. Following the annexation of Crimea in 2014, she joined a volunteer militia, serving for a year in 2015 and again in 2022. After completing her master’s degree, she started working at Zaporizhzhia National University.
Yaryna and Rostyslav dreamed of life beyond the war, planning to marry and “buy a cottage near Kyiv, by the forest, with a big library, and space for me to practice yoga,” she says.
Now, looking at the situation in Ukraine, she says, “It’s very difficult to plan or dream about anything.”
After Rostyslav’s death, Yaryna recalls feeling filled with “emptiness and despair.” What helped her most was her mother’s constant presence. “My mom was always there for me, every minute of the day,” she says.
However, the outside world offered little to no understanding. People who had never experienced such a loss would tell her that she was young, that she still had her whole life ahead of her, that she could still have children, or that she would still get married.
“I don’t need to hear that. I don’t want to hear that. Situations like this pull me and others like me into deep emotional pits,” Yaryna says.
Healing Together
With countless stories like Yaryna’s – estimates vary that between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022 –people across Ukraine are turning to community-based projects to remember their loved ones and find comfort in shared experiences.
In Zaporizhzhia, residents have created memorial sites to honor those lost to the war. “We have planted rowan trees and placed small photographs of our loved ones taken by war in their honor,” Yaryna says.
She also finds connection through shared passions: Rostyslav had been a devoted fan of the Dynamo Kyiv football club, and Yaryna now stays in touch with other families of deceased fans. “We get together and travel to games abroad and in Ukraine,” she says. While these gatherings offer a sense of community and comfort, they do not provide structured assistance for the deeper emotional and psychological challenges of grief.
Yaryna found that kind of support in something she herself had helped build.
In April 2023, before she lost Rostyslav, she and her mother, Viktoria, had started a support group called Kokhanyi, ya zhyvu! (Beloved, I Live!) for wives and girlfriends of fallen soldiers. The elder Herashchenko is a psychologist with experience supporting Ukrainian military families since 2014.
The inspiration for Kokhanyi, ya zhyvu! came after the death of a family friend, whose wife turned to the Herashchenkos for support. The program now provides free weekly sessions for women in need. Women typically learn about the program through word of mouth from other participants or via the group’s social media channels.
Despite the substantial emotional burden on the founders themselves – both Yaryna and Viktoria have been supporting others while carrying their own sorrow.
“The fact that I was helping others saved me from falling into the abyss of grief,” Yaryna says. “Just before [Rostyslav’s] death, he made me promise that I would finish writing my dissertation and defend it,” she says. On 3 September of this year, she fulfilled that pledge, earning her doctorate.
What makes the Herashchenkos’ project different from similar initiatives is that it doesn’t just create a community of people with shared experiences, it also provides structured therapy, combined with group activities. Unlike most initiatives, it is entirely community-run by women who have themselves experienced loss, giving it a depth of understanding and authenticity that is rare.
“They find comfort and understanding among women who are going through the same experiences,” Yaryna says. Studies of similar groups have found that participants feel less isolated in their grief as they recognize that many others share their concerns.
Beyond Conventional Talk Therapy
Participants meet in person in small groups of eight for eight weeks – the small numbers creating an intimacy that fosters a strong sense of community. This is especially important because many widows are often reluctant to speak about their loss, even in private support groups (Yaryna did not recommend interviewing participants for this reason).
Each meeting begins with Viktoria running a group therapy session, but the program goes beyond conventional talk therapy. Local community members lead follow-up activities designed to reinforce what has been learned. These vary and can include yoga, archery, and art therapy. One exercise has the women write letters to the loved ones they have lost, fold them into paper boats, and either float them down the Dnipro or burn them.
Yaryna’s favorite activity is standing on a Sadhu board, a wooden board with many small nails that is used for acupressure, meditation, and yoga. She says, “The girls really love this. They describe it as a turning point.”
These ritual-like, physical exercises help participants process trauma, moving beyond mere coping toward transformation.
“The program officially ends after eight weeks, but they [participants] are not left alone,” says Yaryna, explaining that the women continue to meet regularly even after the formal sessions conclude.
Although programs like this provide essential emotional support, they cannot, however, replace structured, individualized psychiatric or clinical care. While Kokhanyi, ya zhyvu! provides an emotional crutch, shared understanding, and coping strategies, it cannot offer assessment, diagnosis, or treatment for conditions like severe depression, PTSD, or anxiety.
Yaryna said she wishes they could host more groups or expand to other cities, but for now, it isn’t possible with the limited resources they have. Community-run without government assistance, the program relies on donations and volunteer contributions and even in Zaporizhzhia, scarcity of both trained facilitators and funds limits the number of women that can participate. In addition, this city and others in the eastern regions near active combat zones face frequent missile attacks, power outages, and ongoing disruptions, making it more difficult to find safe, reliable locations for weekly in-person meetings, as well as skilled local trainers.
Still, despite being in its early stages and these challenges, the program’s impact is already visible. So far, 56 women have completed it, and Yaryna has observed a change: “Looking at the women from the first groups, we can see that they are no longer just trying to exist, but learning to live.”
Katarzyna Tarczynska writes for the women’s section at Rzeczpospolita, a Polish nationwide newspaper.
