By Olha Chepil | 2025-12-10

At 9 am in Ukraine, even the traffic grieves. Cars stop mid-commute, traffic lights stay red, and people on sidewalks, in offices and in classrooms fall still, a hand over their hearts, eyes closed. For one minute, the country remembers its dead.

Three years into the war, dozens of new rituals have emerged, from live flowers at funerals to lullabies that mothers sing to their dead sons.

In March 2022, several weeks after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine's president signed a decree instituting a nationwide moment of silence every day at 9 am. Since then, the country has interrupted its mornings to honor fallen soldiers, volunteers, civilians and children.

Over time, the gesture has become more than a state directive -- it is now a daily habit and a new form of collective memory.

A nation pauses

The moment of silence is observed across cities and towns.

In Kyiv, traffic comes to a complete standstill at 9:00 am on Khreshchatyk Street, one of the city's busiest thoroughfares. Activists have also proposed halting the metro during this time.

"It's very moving when you're part of that wave," Viktoria Tokhta, a pianist and piano teacher, told Kontur. Most mornings she is driving to work, but when the clock strikes 9:00, she pulls over and takes a minute to remember those whose lives the war has taken.

"For me, the moment of silence is a way to honor everyone we've lost. I have friends and acquaintances who went to fight and, sadly, died. This is the time when I can devote at least a minute to them -- to show that I don't forget them, that they are always in my heart," she said.

For Tokhta, this is not a formality.

"The one minute I give them each day helps keep their memory alive," she added.

She believes the ritual matters for future generations: "Children learn about the war, the cost of life and history. Parents will be able to pass this memory on to their children."

Kneeling for the fallen

As casualties mounted, funerals and farewells shifted and deepened.

When the body of a fallen service member returns home, communities line the streets, kneel and hold only live flowers bound with blue and yellow ribbons. Cars stop as the procession passes. At some burials, families receive a cartridge case from the final salute, a physical sign their relative's sacrifice had been seen.

Journalist Inna Zykova's husband, cinematographer Denys Ponomarenko, volunteered to fight and was killed. His funeral took place on Kyiv's Independence Square, where crowds knelt.

"Here everyone kneels down when the coffin holding the hero goes by," Zykova told Kontur. "Even the women who just sell flowers next to the grave kneel down. It's very important."

In many cities, mothers sing lullabies to their dead sons in church. The war blurred the divide between private and public mourning, turning intimate gestures into shared acts of remembrance.

After recent shelling in Ternopil, a father who survived held the small coffin of his 18-month-old son and rocked it gently, as though soothing a living child. Such scenes, now common across Ukraine, reflected how the war reshaped the vocabulary of grief -- making it direct, communal and impossible to look away from.

Zykova said the emerging rituals help preserve the personal dimension of each loss.

"It's very important to us that these deaths not be forgotten," she said. Daily violence, she noted, risked numbing the country. "But for me it's important to uphold the memory."

She and other widows launched a petition for an Avenue of Glory in their neighborhood -- a walkway lined with names and photos of the dead. Such memorials are appearing in cities and villages nationwide, becoming places of pilgrimage.

"Children who pass by the memorial will ask, 'Who is that? Why [are they here]?'" she said. As they grow, she added, the answers will "weave into their memory the value of what these people died for."

Memory in motion

The war has also changed how Ukrainians understand memory itself.

New customs -- daily silence, kneeling farewells, live flowers, roadside memorials and Avenues of Glory -- now shape the country's emotional landscape.

Psychologist Olha Pohrebniak said rituals served a stabilizing purpose.

"Rituals provide us with a sense of stability, help us cope with what we don't understand, and transform pain into something comprehensible," she told Kontur.

She described them as building blocks of identity, teaching future generations to value the courage and lives of the dead.

"Little rituals, like kneeling, saying goodbye together and connecting to a shared energy, are a part of our identity," Pohrebniak said. "We are Ukrainians, and our warriors stand as angels guarding the line between good and evil."

Participating in ceremonies, honoring the anthem or creating an Avenue of Glory helped people feel part of something larger, she said. Memory rituals reinforced connectedness and shaped collective consciousness.

"These rituals restore people's humanity and enable them to feel a connection to society and history," Pohrebniak said. "The war is destroying the familiar world, but through brief daily pauses the Ukrainians are preserving memory, turning mourning into a force that unites the country."