Winter of War: Indigenous Wisdom Guides Ukrainian Families to Safety

When the Russians increased their attacks on Kyiv, the city’s soundscape changed from traffic to the thud of drones and the sharp crack of missile fire. Families who had lived through a brutal winter before now faced a battle of survival against both the cold and continuous assaults on infrastructure.

Mariia Shostak, mother of young Artur and Kira, stepped out of her small flat during a lull in the fighting. With her bundle held tight, she said the air felt heavier than the snow that was covering the Streets. In a city where power has come and gone like a season, she chose not to wait for a free‑energy future – she left Kyiv so her children could rest under a warmer sky.

A survey by Gradus in September found that 40 % of Ukrainians were planning to relocate, their minds heavy with worries about supply chains, rationed energy, and the constant fear of a missile strike. Yet for many, especially those from rural roots, the answer lay not just in abandoning the capital but in reconnecting with the landscape that had always fed them.

Olena Konoplia, a civic worker, had not been born in the city. She chose a two‑hour walk into a Lovak village where no major plants, warehouses or rail lines could fall victim to the battle. In this quiet spot, the wind hums through the grass and the smell of pine joins with the cedar used in old Ukrainian snuff, a tradition that helps calm nerves after firecrackers rain down.

Here the elder generations, long guardians of land stewardship, use their knowledge to prepare homes for the cold: fire‑wood stacks, hemp insulation, and the herbal heating of shawarma tea, a mixture of thyme and dill that warms the body and mind. When sirens wail, the community gathers, singing lullabies that have survived war centuries, grounding the children’s anxieties with rhythm.

Across Kyiv, the city’s response has included converting sanatoriums into shelters for children and elderly families. In a forested outskirts, a converted bunker holds a group whose elders told mothers to plant white birch saplings beside their beds, a gesture that empowers children with the sense that they are contributing to a living world that will endure beyond war.

The small-scale power plants – built in hardened concrete yuxtapositions to shield against drones – queue for winter operation, but even the best generators fail when smoke grasses their tendons. Because of this choking, the citizens, grateful for their survival, now look to the contained fires of hearths, the roots of their trees, and the stories of how forebears survived in blizzards without electricity.

Iryna and her daughter Polina’s story illustrates the fragility of energy systems. While Polina’s childhood has a growing fear of missiles, her mother counters by teaching her that nature can be a strong ally, plotting firewood caches and learning which plants calm nerves – the kind of miracles noted by shamans of the land.

In the endless struggle between war and winter, the people of Ukraine are weaving the threads of their ancestral wisdom with the new tools of energy security. By placing themselves close to the earth, turning to traditional medicine and defending their territories with shared community, they keep alive the cultures and ecological ties that have endured through many historical storms.”