“The Heroesʼ Memorial on Independence Square has turned into chaos. But whoever starts to restore order there will be killed.” What laws govern the memorial site in the center of Kyiv

At the end of July, a strong storm turned the national memorial to heroes on Maidan Nezalezhnosti into a yellow-blue-brown mess. The wind knocked over large flags and portraits of soldiers in puddles and dirt. Several flags were scattered across the square and blown onto the road. The municipal workers who were supposed to help with this did not arrive. Order was restored by two women who take care of the memorial — Tetyana Prantenko and Natalia Klymyuk (as well as Nataliaʼs husband Oleh). The couple stuck the flags into the wet ground — they bent under their own weight and fell. Tetyana folded the banners with portraits of soldiers into bags and took them home to wash. People walking on the wet Maidan stepped over the flags, took photos and moved on. The national memorial is a place in the center of Kyiv that belongs to everyone and no one. And this is not just a nice phrase — it really is. These are flower beds, abundantly covered with flags, photographs of the dead, flowers and lamps. Unnoticed by passers-by and the authorities, the memorial began to live according to the rules of a cemetery: here they divide the land, reserve the best places, throw out other peopleʼs portraits to make room for their own. How did this happen, who keeps everything in piles, why are the authorities afraid to approach the memorial? Babel correspondent Hanna Mamonova sought answers from volunteers, memorialization experts and city authorities. And she found them, but no one will like them.

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In April 2022, relatives of soldiers blocked in Mariupol gathered on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, and they simply cared. They demanded to free the fighters from the city surrounded by Russians. In the crowd was a 56-year-old American named Ryan Routh, unknown to anyone. He set up a tent on the Maidan and made a small poster:

"My girlfriend was killed by Putin. If you know someone who was killed by Putin, put up a flag."

At first, the call was ignored, but gradually small blue-and-yellow flags began to appear on one of the flower beds on the Maidan — people stuck them into the ground.

In May-June 2022, the mothers of “Azov” soldiers whose children died defending Mariupol raised their first hundred blue-and-yellow flags. Among the women was Vira Lytvynenko. Her 27-year-old son Vladyslav “Vector” was killed on March 23 near the Mariupol Drama Theater.

“We stuck blue and yellow flags in the ground, wrote names and dates of death on them. Later, we laid out the flags in the shape of a heart. We called it ʼHeart Outʼ. We were just mothers who had lost their children and were trying to do something,” recalls Vira.

In July, flags appeared on the memorial for those killed in Olenivka, a colony near occupied Donetsk, where the Russians killed at least 53 Ukrainian prisoners. The memorial grew. An American and his translator named Serhii "Phoenix" started notebooks in which people wrote down information about those for whom they put up flags. Later, Ryanʼs tent was removed from the Maidan, but the notebooks remained — they were called "memory books". In 2023, there were four of them.

Ryan lived in Ukraine for five months and, disappointed with everything — the people, the authorities, and the “ungrateful communists” — returned home to the United States, where he wrote a book about it (here is a brief summary).

In September 2024, Routh was arrested for a shooting at a golf club where presidential candidate Donald Trump was playing. This is how the Americans and Ukrainians learned that Routh had previously had problems with the law, and after the shooting he was accused of two more crimes.

Natalia Klymyuk was left to oversee the memorial on the Maidan. She talks little and reluctantly about herself. She is a volunteer with 11 years of experience, that is, since the Maidan. Natalia says that together with Ryan, she bandaged the first broken flags with electrical tape. She remembers how flags for civilians began to appear — a woman from Okhtyrka brought one of these — her ten-year-old child died under shelling. Natalia also found the "memory notebooks", but she does not know where they disappeared to.

Natalia has one of her own flags at the memorial. Her husband Oleh sells such flags nearby. Theirs is for their nephew Oleksandr, who died in the Donetsk region in the winter of 2023. Natalia placed a large one next to the standard flag. The military did the same after her — they brought large brigade flags. Relatives began to place small portraits of the dead.

Natalia appointed herself the caretaker of the memorial. She weedes the grass, fixes flags and framed portraits. The couple lives off what Oleh earns. Natalia says:

“Here, in front of the boys, I am clean,” she works off every hryvnia.

Until the end of the summer of 2024, the memorial occupied a single flowerbed near the metro exit. When it needed to be mowed, municipal workers, together with volunteers and the parents of the deceased, took out about a thousand flags, mowed them, and put them back. A year ago, everything began to change.

“We stopped taking care of the entire memorial area, only our heart. People are carrying crosses, banners with portraits, everything has turned into chaos, and it cannot be stopped,” says Vira Lytvynenko from “Heart Out”.

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Now the memorial occupies the entire space on the Maidan from the side of the Tchaikovsky Academy of Music. There are four flower beds in the flags. The memorial has grown in half a year, when the free flower beds began to be occupied by brigades and special forces. They divide them into squares, fence them with a garden border or rigid film. The perimeter is covered with decorative stones. The portraits and flags are placed not close together, but with indentations.

The closest to the music academy is the square of the "Da Vinci Wolves" battalion, followed by the 157th separate mechanized brigade, the special unit of the National Guard "Omega", the Main Intelligence Directorate "Stuhna" and the 93rd brigade "Kholodnyi Yar".

Between them, relatives of the deceased place wrought-iron roses and silk flowers. Portraits of the deceased are printed on large flags and banners. To make them hold better, one end is tied to flagpoles, the other to trees. Trying to depict at least an approximate diagram of who is where — a brigade, a soldier, or a community — is futile.

“Iʼm here every day and sometimes I get lost,” says Natalia.

The police laid out their square with black stones, and the Serhii Kulchytskyi National Guard Battalion put up two large banners with almost 100 portraits.

The memorial is attacked from time to time — flags are set on fire, photographs are broken. The last time was in May 2025 — after that, the security of the memorial was strengthened. Now there are up to six police officers on duty there. The Kraken special unit placed a cardboard box next to its site with the inscription:

"Weʼll find you anyway."

Every day the memorial is becoming more and more like a cemetery. People are booking places here, fighting for the best locations. The biggest competition is for a place in the flowerbed where the memorial began. It is completely full. Sometimes people come and throw other peopleʼs flags into the trash by the handful.

"I ask one thing of people — be respectful. Donʼt throw away someone elseʼs flag. Every flag is someoneʼs child. Maybe it was placed by a mother who is no longer among the living. One woman finds her sonʼs flag because there is a candle nearby. I protect it like the apple of my eye," says Natalia.

She puts broken flags that have been stepped on or thrown away into transparent containers that she calls “memory boxes”. She has 16 of them. All of them appeared this year — flags have never been broken so en masse before.

While we are talking, Oleh takes a passerby to his wife.

“Natasha, do we have ʼMaguraʼ, artillerymen from the 47th?”

“We have artillerymen, but not from the 47th,” she answers and continues the tour of the memorial. She shows a portrait of a soldier, the glass in the frame is cracked. Natalia suggested that the relatives replace the frame, but they refused. The husband is missing, and the cracked glass is a sign for them that he may be alive.

“I don’t know what to do with the Rivne region. The military put up flags, but there’s always a puddle in that place,” says Natalia.

Natalia says that the municipal services do not take care of the memorial — they only sweep the tiles. They do not pull out the grass, they do not throw away the wilted flowers. This is what she and several families of the deceased and the teams that come to clean up "near them" do.

“Once, young people were sitting next to us and shouting: ʼPutin is a dick.’ I told them: ʼOf course he is, but letʼs help me pull up the grass near the military.’ And no one responded,” recalls Natalia.

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Vira Lytvynenko from "Heart Out" is a member of the Kyiv City State Administrationʼs coordination council on memorialization issues. And there she constantly talks about the problems of the memorial — they donʼt listen to her.

"A memorial is a way to experience grief. In grief, a person only hears themselves and doesnʼt think at all about how it looks (or is) aesthetic," says Lytvynenko.

In her opinion, the memorial looked good when there were only small flags, everything else was unnecessary. But now there is too much "extra" and no one knows what to do with it.

"Anyone who starts to restore order there, remove crosses, flags, portraits, will be killed. The families of the dead will be killed," Lytvynenko is convinced.

The Kyiv City State Administration is trying to stay away from these problems. When asked by Babel, they replied that the memorial on Maidan is a peopleʼs memorial — the authorities do not interfere there. To create an official memorial, "a legislative decision is needed". For example, the adoption of the law " On the Principles of the State Policy of the National Memory of the Ukrainian People". The deputies wrote it, but did not vote on it.

And even if they vote, it will not solve the problem of the memorial on Maidan, says the head of the Institute of National Remembrance Oleksandr Alfyorov. This requires not general principles, but quite practical things: what the memorial should look like, with what feeling a person will enter and leave there — with grief, tragedy or with pride.

“We need to build a story around the memorial to the heroes on Maidan in order to ennoble it and create a complex,” says Alfyorov.

He plans to write a document that will answer these questions by the end of the summer. It will be a “nationwide concept for all memorials in the country”.

Maksym Yelihulashvili, who has been working on the topic of memorialization for over ten years, says that the situation on Maidan is typical. In Ukraine, there is a popular (spontaneous) memorialization and no state one: people do something themselves, and the authorities watch from the sidelines, "because itʼs scary, because the topic is complex and people are in grief".

“It’s good that there are volunteers like Natalia on the Maidan who will raise the flags after the rain and tell people about this place. If they disappear, the memorial will suffer the fate of the wall of memory near St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral,” says Yelihulashvili.

It was created in 2015, with 5 000 portraits posted. Volunteers took care of everything: they kept electronic lists, updated photos, and added names. After 2022, the volunteers mobilized, but no one came to replace them. People who lost loved ones began to paste new photos.

When there was no free space left, they began to remove othersʼ photos. No one records the stories of the deceased, the photos fade, peel off, and lie along the wall in dust.