Kateryna Chyzhyk
Wife of a fallen servicemember
Kateryna Chyzhyk’s activism isn’t just something she does — it’s part of her character. Before 2014, she was involved in civic work, serving as deputy head of the National Council on Condominium Issues under the Cabinet of Ministers. After 2014, she became a volunteer, mainly supporting the Dnipro-1 battalion.
Kateryna met her partner, Colonel Mykhailo Chumachenko, at the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2014.
A career military officer from Kryvyi Rih, he was leading the intelligence sector at the time. In 2016, he left the army due to health reasons. “Those were the happiest years of our civilian life — until the full-scale invasion,” Kateryna recalls.
In 2022, after the full-scale war began, they married — simply, in the military headquarters, with a gauze veil, yet profoundly happy. “When the war started, I knew he would go anyway. He left — and I joined to serve too. I didn’t serve as long, but he continued until 2023…”
In August 2023, Mykhailo tragically died in a car accident on the first day of his leave. Kateryna, riding as a passenger, was taken by ambulance.
“I got out of the car on my own. I tried to pull him out and couldn’t. Then I found his phone — I was afraid it would fall into the wrong hands because he had high-level access to information.”
Speaking about the following days and months is still painful. Friends informed doctors and family that Kateryna was in such a severe emotional state that she might harm herself if she learned of her husband’s death. For this reason, Mykhailo was buried without her presence. She was only told about his death four days later, and she visited his grave for the first time on the fortieth day.
The investigator questioning her about the circumstances of her husband’s death was harsh and unempathetic. “These soldiers get drunk…” he said, adding to her pain, though it had nothing to do with the colonel. Legally, Mykhailo’s death was classified as a “non-combat loss,” so Kateryna does not have the status of a military widow.
Kateryna returned to life thanks to an invitation from a fellow Maidan activist to join the “Volunteer Institute” project in Lviv. It was there that the idea emerged to create a psychological support space in Dnipro — a place where people with similar experiences could heal, engage in non-traumatic communication, and receive professional support.
«This was life-saving for me. Through action, I could think not only about ‘here and now’ but also about what I had to do tomorrow. Small planning like this helped me find meaning in repeated routines and physical-emotional circumstances — to move the day from today to tomorrow. We received a large grant, and on April 19, 2024, the psychological support center ‘ProZhyty’ opened in Dnipro.».
Kateryna Chyzhyk became its director. In a year, more than 5,000 people visited the space and received professional psychological assistance after experiencing war trauma.
Now, Kateryna and her team have developed the concept for a rehabilitation center called “After Loss.” In addition to crisis support and accompaniment for people who have lost loved ones in the war, the center offers rehabilitation programs: groups of wives, parents, or children spend two weeks in recreational spaces with specialists, not only processing grief but also seeking new meaning in life. Kateryna dreams of establishing a dedicated rehabilitation center in Dnipropetrovsk region — surrounded by nature.
Thanks to support from the military, Kateryna Chyzhyk is back behind the wheel — as if reclaiming control over her own life. For her, victory is associated with the freedom to fly from Dnipro to anywhere in the world and with the restoration of the “Mriya” plane.
For Kateryna, victory means freedom.