Towering high above the green bluffs on the right bank of the Dnieper River in Kyiv stands one of the most monumental sculptures ever engineered in human history: the Mother Ukraine monument (Batkivshchyna-Maty). Forged entirely from gleaming titanium-alloy stainless steel and rising a total of three hundred and thirty-five feet (one hundred and two meters) from the base of its museum pedestal to the tip of its uplifted sword—making it taller than New York’s Statue of Liberty—this colossal warrior woman has evolved over four decades from a late Soviet war memorial into the ultimate fiercely defiant symbol of modern Ukrainian independence.
Yevgeny Vuchetich, Vasyl Borodai, and Titanium Engineering
Conceived in the 1970s as the centerpiece of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, the monument was originally sketched by the famous sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich—the same artist who designed the sprawling The Motherland Calls concrete statue in Volgograd. When Vuchetich died in 1974 before construction began, leadership of the project passed to the renowned Ukrainian sculptor Vasyl Borodai, who completely redesigned the facial features, proportions, and weaponry of the figure, modeling her serene yet unyielding face after the gifted Ukrainian sculptor Halyna Kalchenko.
Rather than casting the giant in concrete, which cracks under freezing winter frost, Ukrainian metallurgists and engineers at the E.O. Paton Electric Welding Institute in Kyiv decided to construct the entire sixty-two-meter (203-foot) figure out of sheets of specialty stainless steel smelted in Zaporizhzhia. Welded together block by block using nearly thirty kilometers (nineteen miles) of continuous precision seams and hoisted into place by a custom hundred-meter crane before its opening in May 1981, the finished structure is an engineering powerhouse:
- Monumental Scale and Weight: Resting atop a forty-meter conical museum building, the total structure weighs 450 metric tons, engineered on a deep reinforced foundation to withstand earthquakes and hurricane-force Dnieper winds.
- The Sword and the Wind Damper: In her right hand, the statue raises a sixteen-meter (52-foot) steel sword weighing nine tons. To prevent the sword tip from rising higher than the golden cross atop the nearby Great Lavra Bell Tower of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery—and to reduce aerodynamic wind vibration identified in wind-tunnel tests in Moscow—engineers shortened the sword by three meters and installed a special pendular damping weight inside the blade’s hollow core.
- The Shield: In her left hand, she holds up a massive thirteen-by-eight-meter steel shield weighing thirteen tons, facing directly eastward across the Dnieper River.
August 2023: Replacing the Hammer and Sickle With the Tryzub
For forty-two years after its inauguration in 1981—and for more than three decades after Ukraine regained its independence in 1991—the giant thirteen-ton shield in the statue’s left hand still bore the raised steel relief of the Soviet State Emblem: the Hammer and Sickle surrounded by wheat sheaves. Following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the sight of a warrior statue overlooking Kyiv facing east while still holding the emblem of Moscow’s old empire became intolerable to the Ukrainian public. In a nationwide digital poll conducted on the government’s Diia app involving nearly eight hundred thousand citizens, eighty-five percent voted to cut the Soviet emblem off the shield and replace it with the Tryzub—the thousand-year-old Ukrainian Trident that served as the royal seal of Prince Volodymyr the Great of Kyivan Rus.
In late July and early August 2023, high-altitude riggers dangling three hundred feet in the air dismantled the Soviet hammer and sickle piece by piece. On the morning of August sixth, 2023, just ahead of Ukraine’s Independence Day, workers hoisted and welded a gleaming new five-meter-tall stainless-steel Tryzub onto the center of the shield, while the monument was officially renamed from Rodina-Mat (Motherland) to Mother Ukraine—completing its transformation into the guardian sentinel of the nation’s capital.
