Ukrainian parents are writing IDs on their children’s bodies

The mother’s hands trembled as she began to write on her 2-year-old child’s body. They were so shaky she couldn’t write them correctly on the first try, even though the information was the second: Her daughter’s name, Vira, along with their date of birth and family phone number.

“I thought that if me and my husband died, Vira might find out who she was,” the mother, Oleksandra Makoviy, recalls.

For Vira, standing in a diaper in their home in Kyiv, the writing on her back is a game. She did not know that the bombing had begun.

Makoviy’s desperate attempt to prepare her daughter for possible orphanage as the whole family tried to escape the Ukrainian capital during the Russian invasion has become a painful symbol of a woman’s anguish. parent country.

A photo of Vira’s back that Ms. Makoviy shared on Instagram was seen hundreds of thousands of times, after it was amplified by Ukrainian journalists and government officials. Messages of support from people around the world – many Ukrainian parents say they have done the same, and others have turned the image into art honoring the country’s innocent people across the globe. social network.

President Volodymyr Zelensky referred directly to efforts like Makoviy’s in a speech before the Spanish Parliament last week.

“Imagine this: mothers in Ukraine write on the backs of their young children,” he said, adding that Russia is destroying “any basis of normal life.”

The photo’s wide reach has led some, especially on Twitter, to accuse Ms Makoviy of orchestrating the moment. But she said she shared the photo because she wanted her small audience at the time to feel the “crazy” Ukrainian parents were suffering.

The Russian invasion on February 24th shocked Makoviy. She describes the family’s daily routine in a dreamlike state, and recalls trying to play with Vira with the sound of bombs in the distance.

But Makoviy, a 33-year-old painter born and raised in Kyiv, is also aware that the man-made island they inhabit along the Dnipro river has no underground shelter, she said. The picture of the horrors caused by Russian forces in the Syrian city of Aleppo flashed in her mind.

The whole family packed up the car to leave the capital in the night.

Before they left, Makoviy scribbled Vira’s information on her back. Makoviy said that Vira’s age and inability to understand the situation is a blessing. The child inherits a love of art – she loves to draw on her body – and is unaware of the gravity of what her mother has carved on her.

However, Mrs Makoviy was moved to tears on the drive west by her daughter’s repeated pleas to go home and see her grandmother, who gave them the teddy bear they brought and only later escaped from Ukraine.

Makoviy, who couldn’t sleep or kept food until they crossed the border into Moldova, didn’t want to lie. “We can’t go home now,” she told her daughter.

The family eventually reached a village in the south of France, where they found refuge. Speaking by phone, Ms Makoviy said she thought that if the worst happened, Vira could at least look back at her mother’s Instagram, full of everyday moments from their lives before the war, and see that she was surrounded by love and esteem.

After their journey, Vira also has reminders of that love – some of the volunteers on their route gave her teddy bears. Along with her grandmother’s bear, who is traveling from Poland to reunite with her, she has amassed a small collection.