The small corner office Mothers of Maidan on the second floor of Ukraine House looks neater than most places where protesters hang around. After all, they are mothers.
The movement was started in response to violent clashes on Jan. 19-22, during which at least four demonstrators were killed in police attacks. The victims’ photographs are on display here, with the inscription: “I will carry on your pain.”
Mothers of Maidan conducted their first anti-violence protest on Jan. 24. Wearing posters that said “Mama,” they lined in the no-man’s territory between the Berkut riot-control police and the protesters, holding hands, praying and begging the police to come over to the other side.
They have kept busy since then, holding marches and other events to promote the idea that protests must remain peaceful.
A middle-aged woman in a long gray coat walks out of the Mothers of Maidan office with a heavy plastic bag, a megaphone, some rolled-up posters and a flag.
“Oh, I forgot icons,” she shouts and dashes off, only to return with an icon of Mother of God. “Have to take everything, we are meeting up with the others at Maidan soon, going to picket the Russian Embassy,” she says.
The woman’s name is Vira. She is an accountant in the town of Ladyzhyn in Vinnytsa Oblast. She does not give her last name. “I have three children and three grandchildren that are not involved, let this be my own trouble,” she explains.
Vira does administrative work, such as registering newcomers and preparing posters. There are about 150 women in the group now. “Most of them come and go, of course, some join just for several days and then leave for home to come back later,” she explains.
Vira Huben, 58, a native of Lviv, says she could not stay away. “I saw an angel in my dream telling me I should go and then a woman from Kyiv came to our church and said there is this movement, so I decided I am going,” she says.
Huben says she also has two children, and though her own children are not here “every mom can understand the sorrow from the lost lives, no matter whose children they belonged to.”
Mothers of Maidan have been accused of being a fake movement that actually sympathizes with police. Russian blogger Illiya Varlamov criticized the movement, saying that the event in which they kneeled in front of soldiers looked fake. “I don’t know who these women were and I actually believe that they came there with sincere feelings, but they looked exactly like (President Viktor) Yanukovych’s paid electorate,” he wrote in his blog on Jan. 25.
Activists say they are genuine but can do a better job of communicating their message. “We want to say that we are united, all the children are our own children, those on the other side are just misinformed, I believe, at least the interior troops (police) who are obliged to be there,” says Nadia Moiseeva, a 62-year-old from Luhansk Oblast who lives in Kyiv.
Some women have relatives in uniforms. Lubov Hovorun, a 62-year-old from Obukhiv in Kyiv Oblast, says one of her two grandsons is a police officer in Kharkiv, a stronghold of pro-Russian, anti-EuroMaidan sentiment. “He was sent to serve there for four months after studying at the Tax Academy, he is not being sent here, thank God, but my heart still aches,” Hovorun says.
Some mothers have children too young to protest. One of them is Alina Serbin, 34, who has a 12-year-old son. She says some question her motives because she is so young. “But mothers can be even much younger than me and all this is actually about women’s role in the revolution. We can defend peace in our own way,” she says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected]
