Most visitors arrive with one date in their heads. They come to see what 2022 did to Kyiv, and they leave having seen it.
The thing they usually miss is that the memorials to 2022 are being built in a city that has been arguing about how to remember for eighty years, and that the argument is visible on the ground if you know the order to walk it in. Central Kyiv holds three catastrophes inside a short walk, each commemorated under a different political weather, and each shaped by what the previous one was allowed to say.
This is a guide to reading that sequence. For the practical and ethical side of visiting war-touched places, the responsible tourism guide covers it properly; for Bucha’s memorial landscape specifically, Walking Through Memory does. This one is about why Kyiv’s memorials look the way they do.
1941: Babyn Yar, and the memorial that was not allowed
North-west of the centre there is a ravine. Over two days in September 1941, German forces and their collaborators murdered tens of thousands of Kyiv’s Jews there, and killings continued at the site for months afterwards. It is one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust.
What matters for anyone reading Kyiv’s memorial landscape is what happened next. For decades there was no monument. Soviet policy did not permit the victims to be commemorated as Jews; the official line folded them into an undifferentiated mass of “peaceful Soviet citizens”. Plans were floated to build over the ravine entirely. The first monument, when it finally came in 1976, said nothing about who had been killed there or why.
That absence is the most instructive thing at the site. Babyn Yar teaches, before any other memorial in the city, that a state can decide a catastrophe will not be remembered in its own terms — and that the decision holds for as long as the state does.
In the opening weeks of the 2022 invasion, the area near the site was struck during an attack on the adjacent television tower. The coincidence was not lost on anyone here.
2014: Instytutska Street, and memory made while it was still happening
Walk up from Maidan Nezalezhnosti and the street climbs steeply. This is Instytutska, where protesters were shot during the final days of the Revolution of Dignity in February 2014. The dead are known collectively as the Heavenly Hundred.
The memorial here is the opposite of Babyn Yar’s in every respect that counts. It was made immediately, informally, by the people who had been standing on that street, and only later formalised. Photographs, helmets, flowers and hand-written boards appeared within days. Nobody waited for permission and nobody was going to get it wrong on purpose.
This is where the honest chronology of the war becomes unavoidable for a visitor. Ukrainians do not date this war from 2022. The memorial on Instytutska is eight years older than the invasion, and the country that was invaded in 2022 had already buried people for the same argument.
2022: a wall that keeps getting longer
Back down the hill and along to St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery. On the outside of its wall are photographs of Ukrainians killed since 2014, mounted in rows.
There is no single thing to look at here. The effect is the length. The wall has been extended repeatedly, and it is extended because it has to be. Visitors slow down without being asked to, and most people stop talking.
The square in front of the monastery did something else in 2022 that visitors ask about: destroyed Russian military vehicles were parked there, in the open, for the city to walk past. It was a deliberate act of display rather than a memorial, and opinion here is genuinely split on whether that was the right register — proof and trophy to some, an unsuitable thing to photograph children in front of to others. Both views are held by people who lived through the month it commemorated.
The monument that changed its own mind
A short ride from the centre stands the Motherland Monument, a hundred-metre titanium figure raised in 1981 as the centrepiece of the Soviet war museum complex.
In 2023 the Soviet coat of arms on her shield was replaced with the Ukrainian trident.
Nothing else about the statue moved. She is the same figure, on the same hill, above the same museum, and the single change to the object she holds converts the whole thing from one country’s monument into another’s. If you want one image for how Kyiv is handling the memory it inherited, it is this: not demolition, and not preservation either, but a deliberate edit that leaves the argument visible.
What has not been built yet
There is still no completed national memorial to the 2022 invasion, and the reasons are worth knowing before you go looking for one.
The war has not ended, and permanent memorials are usually built afterwards. The money and the labour are going to reconstruction and to the front. And the question of what should be preserved is genuinely unresolved: whether a damaged building is evidence to keep or a home to repair is not an abstract debate here, because somebody owns it and wants to live in it.
So what exists in the meantime is provisional and mostly unofficial. Flowers and photographs at specific addresses where people were killed, maintained by neighbours. Plaques put up by a school for its own dead. A tree, a bench, a name.
How to read the sequence
Walked in order — the ravine, then Instytutska, then the wall — the three tell one story about who gets to decide what a country is allowed to say about its own dead.
That is the reason to take them together rather than photograph them separately. A visitor who sees only 2022 comes away with a war that started four years ago. A visitor who walks the sequence comes away with the thing Ukrainians are actually defending, which is older and harder to summarise and considerably more worth understanding.
If you want to walk it with someone who was here for the most recent chapter, the city tour covers this ground, or message the guide directly on WhatsApp.