The mother’s hands were shaking when she started writing on her 2-year-old’s body. They trembled so much that she couldn’t write correctly on her first try, even though the information was second nature: Her daughter’s name, Vira, along with her birth date and their family phone numbers.
“I thought that if my husband and I died, Vira could find who she is,” the mother, Oleksandra Makoviy, recalled.
For Vira, standing in a diaper in their house in Kyiv, the writing on her back was a game. She didn’t know that the bombing had begun.
Makoviy’s desperate attempt to prepare her daughter for the possibility of being orphaned as the family attempted to escape the Ukrainian capital during the Russian invasion has become a wrenching symbol of the anguish of a nation of parents.
A photo of Vira’s back that Makoviy shared on Instagram has been seen hundreds of thousands of times, after it was amplified by Ukrainian journalists and government officials. Messages of support poured in from people all over the world — many Ukrainian parents said they had taken similar action, and others turned the image into art honoring the country’s innocent on social media.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a direct reference to efforts like Makoviy’s in a speech to the Spanish Parliament last week.
“Just imagine this: mothers in Ukraine write on the backs of their young children,” he said, adding that Russia was destroying “any basis of normal life.”
The photo’s wide reach has led some people, particularly on Twitter, to accuse Makoviy of staging the moment. But she said she shared the photo because she wanted her small audience at the time to feel the “madness” Ukrainian parents were enduring.
The start of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24 left Makoviy in shock. She described going about the family’s daily routine in a dreamlike state, and recalled trying to play with Vira with the sound of bombs in the distance.
