By AFP | 2024-12-18

KYIV -- Five girls stood still in the freezing December drizzle in Ukraine's capital as a metronome counted a minute of silence, honoring the victims of Russia's invasion.

They were holding banners urging passersby to stop and pay their respects at 9am -- part of an official, but rarely observed, daily ritual in war-torn Ukraine.

The crowd pouring out of Kyiv's central Golden Gate subway station mostly walked on by.

At the end of the countdown, 17-year-old journalism student Olia Kozel folded the cardboard signs into a tote bag.

"I feel angry at the people who don't stop, who look and read -- and I can see in their eyes that they're reading our signs –- but keep going," she told AFP.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy introduced the daily minute's silence in March 2022 to honor those killed by Russia's invasion.

But nearly three years later, and with tens of thousands more dead, few take part.

Kozel is part of a small group trying to change that.

Barring air raid alerts, they gather in central Kyiv once a week for their mini demonstration, trying to remind passersby to pause for 60 seconds.

For her, the minute's silence is a way to process the collective and individual grief hanging over Ukrainians, those living near and far from the front.

'We can't give up'

The campaign to boost observance of the minute's silence is gaining traction.

Last week Kyiv city hall approved the first reading of a bill to make schools and some public transport stop at 9am every day.

The proposals would also see a metronome countdown played on city loudspeakers, as is done in Lviv and elsewhere.

The idea of the minute's silence was initially promoted by Iryna Tsybukh, a journalist-turned-medic, better known by her call sign, Cheka.

Her death near the front in May, three days before her 26th birthday, triggered an outpouring of grief.

"When we found out about Ira's death, we had two questions. First: how can this be? Ira wanted to live so much," her friend Kateryna Datsenko told AFP in a Kyiv cafe, using a diminutive of Iryna.

"Second: we should pick up her fight. We just can't give up."

Tsybukh had wanted Ukrainians to dedicate the minute to loved ones or others who meant something to them.

She saw this as moving away from the impersonal Soviet-era culture of collective memory, and believed it would unite the nation in the face of large-scale trauma.

Zelenskyy said recently that 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the war -- though independent estimates put the toll higher.

The United Nations says its confirmed number of 11,743 killed civilians is a vast underestimate.

With those figures rising every day, activists are trying to instill new meaning to how Ukraine can remember the war's victims -- starting with Datsenko, who co-founded an NGO called Vshanuy (Honor).

"I really have no clue how a country so huge can preserve the memory of each person, but it's possible at the level of the community," said Datsenko, 26.

"Memory can take many shapes. People open bookshops for heroes, some plant tree-lined avenues and care for them, others carry on with people's work or ideas," she said.

'Not enough'

For Anton Drobovych, now former director of Ukraine's National Memory Institute, the minute's silence "is not about war, [but] about people. Those who were with us yesterday, whose warmth we felt but who are no longer here."

"It's about love and the words you didn't have time to say to the people you care about," he added.

A daily reminder of loss locks one in the past, some opponents of the idea say.

But Datsenko said it was necessary to help Ukrainians live with grief -- especially through the uncertainty of war.

"There's a constant balancing act between life and death, security and danger," she said.

"If we all lived only with a sense of danger, we would all go crazy. I don't think we would exist as a country or survive as people."

As she was speaking, the lights shut off -- another power cut caused by Russia's bombardment of Ukraine's energy grid.

Continuing, Datsenko said she wished Tsybukh could see the work her team had done to advance the minute's silence.

Before adding, affectionately: "But Ira would say that we're not doing enough."