Supporting families of Ukrainian prisoners of war and missing soldiers — with legal guidance, psychological care, and the one thing no government programme provides: community.
Families of missing soldiers are not abandoned by law. They are abandoned by distance, complexity, and isolation.
The state provides the soldier's monthly salary to the family — but only upon application, with the right documents, filed to the right authority. A wife in a village in Kherson Oblast, 80 kilometres from the nearest city, does not know which form to file, which office to call, or how to have her husband officially recognised as missing. Without that recognition — no payments, no pension, no legal status.
While she is trying to figure this out alone, friends and relatives gradually pull away — not out of cruelty, but simply not knowing what to say. She ends up isolated inside a grief she cannot even fully express, because her person is not confirmed dead and not confirmed alive.
This is the reality for thousands of families across Ukraine. And it is most acute not in Kyiv — but in the small cities and villages where no one else is doing this work.
She received the death payment. A posthumous Hero of Ukraine medal for her son. She spent that money on one thing — bus tickets to Kyiv to visit his grave. That was her entire world.
Today, she comes to every event we run. She has real friends. She recently asked us when we would open a space where she could come regularly — just to be useful, to be part of something.
That transformation did not come from money. It came from not being alone. — Pani Olena, foundation beneficiary
Legal aid exists. Psychological services exist. What almost no one provides is the combination — and the community that makes both meaningful.
Step-by-step support through the bureaucratic process — document preparation, official applications, status recognition, social payments. We go where lawyers don't: to small towns and remote communities where families have no one to turn to.
Not crisis intervention — sustained presence for people living in permanent uncertainty. Individual sessions, peer support circles, and group workshops, delivered by specialists experienced in war-related and ambiguous loss trauma.
The thing families ask for most. Events where people can breathe around others who truly understand. At every gathering, the first question is: when is the next one? Not for entertainment — because for a few hours, they are not alone.
Every programme can be funded independently — in full or in part. For each, we provide monthly activity reports, financial registers, and supporting documentation by the 10th of the following month.
Individual counselling, peer circles, and group workshops for families of POWs, the missing, and released defenders — delivered by trauma-experienced specialists.
Events for children from POW and missing-soldier families — games, connection, and a few hours of normal life. Five events include parallel psychological workshops for parents.
A tour across 8 Ukrainian cities. Advocacy and community in one: families from across the country travel to attend. Names that must be heard — not forgotten.
Theatre, cinema, events, and shows — a short return to a sense of normal life. Coordination, distribution, and reporting on every ticket that reaches a family.
Books sent to families across Ukraine — a brief break from anxiety and a moment of support. New worlds for children, quiet comfort for adults.
Families share stories about their loved ones — their habits, jokes, dreams. Names heard beyond statistics. Memory that does not fade.
Right now, the three co-founders run this foundation alongside full-time jobs — funding it partly from their own salaries. Current external support ends in July 2026. Without a stable operational base, every programme above operates on borrowed time.
The €9,000/month below is not administrative overhead. It is the team and infrastructure that allow the foundation to scale legal and psychological support to families in remote regions, manage 70+ volunteers, report transparently to every donor, and build toward the international track.
The photo exhibition is how we open the door. What we are building behind it is a European network of partners who help families in ways that go beyond awareness.
We already know how to do this in Ukraine. Companies give us clothing, electronics, household goods, theatre tickets, events — and we guarantee every item reaches the family or the released soldier who needs it, with full reporting. That model travels.
Not every company wants to write a cheque. Many are willing to give something more natural to them — a service, an experience, a product. We receive it, distribute it, and report back exactly who it reached.
A weekend away for a mother who hasn't left her town in a year. A concert ticket for a teenager who lost their father. A flight for a family to attend the exhibition in Rome. Experiences that money rarely buys on its own.
Strength for the Strong was created by three co-founders — Anastasiya Chakubash, Anastasiia Artemova — who saw a gap no state institution was filling: families of POWs and missing soldiers left entirely alone with the hardest bureaucratic, psychological, and human challenges of the war.
In fifteen months, the foundation built 8 active programmes, a 70-person volunteer network, a digital infrastructure serving hundreds of families, and a community that people travel across the country to be part of.