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A museum in Ukraine is pioneering a new role for such a cultural institution: emergency psychological support. Ukraine’s National War Museum, established in Kyiv when Russia invaded the country in 2014, is not only the first to document a war in real time but to offer psychological services to individuals living with the daily threat of bombs and drones and the reality of lost loved ones and destroyed homes.
Documenting a War in Real Time
The museum deploys teams of historians, archivists, photographers, videographers, psychologists, and local field specialists to liberated areas, often arriving only hours after fighting ends. “We have to move quickly,” says Deputy Director Dmytro Hainetdinov. “After a few days, evidence is gone: cleared, buried, burned, or blown away.”
In addition to salvaging the country’s heritage, the museum—whose teams have operated in 35 areas to date—records accounts of survival. Families tell of hiding for weeks in basements, elderly residents of refusing to abandon ruined homes, ordinary people of escapes through minefields.
A New Kind of Museum Work
As museum workers create exhibits of bombed homes, destroyed villages, and churches reduced to shells, teams of psychologists build emotional recovery, so far helping more than 700 children, wounded soldiers and their families, individuals released from captivity, and those scarred by living in frontline or near-frontline areas.
Teams apply the BASIC PH model of recovery originally developed by Israeli psychologist Mooli Lahad. It promotes natural coping skills in the wake of trauma by incorporating creative activities. The work is built around three basic components.
Psychological support: Participants speak about their experiences, fears, and sense of being overwhelmed. The first task, explains psychologist Iryna Uzhakova, is helping people feel the relief that comes from realizing they are not alone.
A game-based transition: Stories and simple games shift attention from threat to agency, providing a bridge between emotional disclosure and the creative exercises that follow.
An “emotions container”: Through drawing, sculpting, or animation, participants give shape to feelings that may be too raw to articulate. The tactile work becomes a safe place for emotions that might otherwise remain unexpressed.
Experience proves that the model readily adapts to varied populations. It has been implemented with police, communities scarred by repeated missile attacks, families of veterans, and children living under constant strain.
Letting Children Be Children Again
One of the Museum’s most moving programs is a five-session workshop for children aged eight to 13. As part of the program, each child creates short, animated videos. During the early sessions, when children are asked to draw, sculpt, or animate, they tend to produce stark, distressing images: tanks, drones, explosions, broken buildings.
By the fifth session, however, the drawings have typically changed. Bicycles appear, along with family pets, clear skies, and personal happy memories. In one video I was shown by Uzhakova, a small paper rabbit hops into a small boat; in the next frame, the rabbit appears to be sailing on a crayon-blue sea.
The war does not vanish from the children’s consciousness, she reports, but their capacity to recall joy revives. “That shift” she observes, “is healing.”
A Final Image
In a scheduled Zoom meeting I recently had with Uzhakova and Hainetdinov— nearly canceled because a power outage in Kyiv and prematurely ended by Uzhakova’s failing laptop battery—the psychologist held up one final drawing from a child. It showed the paper rabbit sailing across the page, this time under a bright yellow sun.
Ukraine’s National War Museum occupies a rare and demanding role, bearing witness to war as it unfolds while also tending to the psychological wounds the war is causing.
