"On the night of 26-27 April, we woke up to a knocking and banging on the door. My mother didn't want to open the door, because she was alone with the children. We heard threats: "Open the door or we'll break it down!" We were all scared and started crying, so my mother opened the door..."

These are memories from the archives about the eviction of the Kushnir family from Lviv in 1950. At that time, entire families were subjected to cynical and massive evictions from their homes. Fear, uncertainty and groundless accusations were a red thread that ran through all the deportations carried out by the imperial and Soviet regimes, from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth.

In Soviet times, women were subjected to physical violence during interrogations, blackmail, and intimidation. Children were taken away to orphanages, men to labour camps, and women to special settlements, tearing families apart and destroying social and cultural ties. These repressions affected not only Ukrainians, but also other peoples: ethnic Germans, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Crimean Tatars, Greeks and Armenians.

Today, history is repeating itself: Ukrainian mothers are hiding their children from the occupiers and Russian "educators" who abduct thousands of minors and forcibly take them to Russia, often turning them into instruments of violence through militarised children's camps. Many women are tortured in captivity; some do not survive. Motherhood in wartime is not only painful, but also a form of resistance: every woman who raises a child with a memory of Ukraine is an act of defiance against the empire and resistance to the propaganda of the "Russian world".

Experience from history

In 1950, two plainclothes men and guards broke into the Kushnir family's apartment. The mother started crying and asking why they were taking her and her three children away. The only answer was "Get ready quickly." The older sister, crying, dressed the younger children, her hands shaking. After a while, the family were taken to the transfer point in Zamarstyniv prison. The conditions were terrible: in the middle of a freezing cold night, the mothers and children were taken out for a "walk", and there was almost no food. In July, they were forced into a freight car – fifty people to a car, hot, stuffy, no air to breathe. The journey lasted for over a month.

The Kushnir family were taken to the town of Sovetskaya Gavan in the Khabarovsk Territory of Russia, more than 10,000 km from Lviv. The children were forcibly placed in specialised institutions, where they were deprived of their native language and identity and raised in the spirit of Soviet ideology. Separated from family traditions and the heritage of their nation, they became victims of deep psychological trauma. In these conditions, it was women who took on the burden of survival: preserving the family, raising children, and maintaining cultural traditions. Motherhood in the face of constant fear, hunger and violence became a symbol of resilience.

They were not the only ones. Similar methods of persecution and violence were used in other regions, including against members of the resistance movement against the Soviet regime. Dzydra Meldere, born in 1928, participated in the Latvian partisan movement with her husband, Laimonis Lapa. Laimonis was killed on 11 March 1949, and Dzydra was arrested and shot in the right arm. Her memoirs from Latvia have survived.

She described the ill-treatment she received during her imprisonment. She was held in the NKVD building in Riga, known as the Corner House (Stūra māja). Dzydra recalled: "My interrogator was Migla, and his assistants worked alongside him, who could be said to be 'tireless' and 'really skilled'. These people were real monsters... One would come and interrogate you and leave, and another would quickly take his place. People who haven't seen this may think that it was all straightforward: you were asked questions, you answered, or you could remain silent if you didn't want to talk. But it wasn't. To them, you were just a nobody that they could do whatever they wanted to. They threatened and tortured me. They beat me, and it was unbearable. When I start remembering all this, I feel very sick..."

Challenges of the present and future

Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, women in Ukraine have been at risk of becoming victims of the new large-scale war crimes being committed in the occupied territories of Ukraine. Life during the war – the destruction of homes, the loss of loved ones, the destroyed infrastructure – has become a daily challenge. Mothers are forced to be both breadwinners and family protectors, as their husbands are often at the front line or have been killed.

The second challenge is the need for resettlement and evacuation. Women with children step out into the unknown, facing health risks and limited access to healthcare and education. The situation is particularly difficult for those who remain in the temporarily occupied territories, where there is a growing threat of violence and abduction of children and their subsequent deportation to Russia. Intimidation, coercion and family separation are not just tactics of war, but an attempt to destroy national identity. At times, it seems that a mother's struggle for her life and the return of her child is one of the most striking manifestations of national resilience.

The third problem is physical violence against women who are held in captivity as civilians, both in the occupied territories of Ukraine and in Russian penal colonies and pre-trial detention centres. Memoirs of a local resident of Berdiansk, recorded in the analytical material of the Media Initiative for Human Rights, describe physical abuse in penal colony No. 77 in the city. She recalls: "They took two books and started hitting my ears from both sides. He asked me: 'Are you Ukrainian?' Once, they hit me on the head: 'Are you still Ukrainian?' They told me to put my hands on the table. They hit my fingers with a book. They didn't break my fingers." This clearly demonstrates that the Russians and their accomplices in the occupied territories did this precisely to break the Ukrainian identity of Ukrainian women. Furthermore, an investigation by the Media Initiative for Human Rights has established information about a detention facility in the Russian Federation that the Russians have set aside exclusively for women. This is penal colony No. 9 in Valuyki, a town in Russia's Belgorod Oblast. Women released from captivity recall that in this penal colony, women are held without proper medical care, and the staff use physical violence, do not provide proper food, and constantly play Russian propaganda songs, which is a common tool of ideological pressure in Russian prisons.

Understanding all these challenges, it becomes clear that the role of women in war is fundamental to Ukraine's recovery. Their strength is manifested in their ability to remain standing through the most difficult times, to protect and support their children, to fight for their future and not break down.

The international community needs to pay more attention to these dimensions of war, because conventional negotiations and ceasefires do not heal the wounds inflicted on mothers and children. Humanitarian aid, psychological support and human rights initiatives are the minimum that can and should be done. This war is not just a continuation of the wars of the past. It is a testament to new stories and tragedies involving women and mothers. That is why active support for women, mothers and children is a matter of national security and moral responsibility to the world.

Vladyslav Havrylov is a researcher for Where Are Our People?, a PR Army project, researcher at Georgetown University, USA, and analyst at the Media Initiative for Human Rights

Volodymyrа Kanfer is a journalist and the author of Erased Histories, a project run by the NGO PR Army, where she studies deportations of national communities during the Russian Empire and the USSR, working with historians, artists and the public.