Henichesk Woman Who Told Russian Soldiers to Carry Sunflower Seeds

Originally published 2022-02-26.

On 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia's full-scale invasion, a short video from the port town of Henichesk in southern Ukraine spread around the world. In it, an unnamed Ukrainian woman walks up to armed Russian soldiers, demands to know why they are on her land, and tells them to take sunflower seeds and keep them in their pockets, so that sunflowers will grow from the spot where they fall. The soldiers stay calm and try to end the conversation. Within hours the clip had been shared millions of times, and the sunflower became one of the best-known symbols of Ukrainian defiance.

Here is what the video shows, where it was filmed, what is and is not known about it, and why a handful of seeds carried so much meaning.

What happens in the video

The footage, roughly a minute long, was filmed on a phone in a street in Henichesk. A woman in a winter coat approaches two soldiers in combat gear with rifles. She asks who they are. One answers that they are carrying out exercises and asks her to move along. She presses him and asks whether they are Russian. He says yes.

From there her tone hardens. Swearing at them, she calls the soldiers occupiers and fascists and asks what they are doing in her country with all their weapons. Then she pulls out sunflower seeds and offers them, telling the men to keep the seeds with them. In one widely used translation she says: "Put sunflower seeds in your pockets so they grow on Ukraine soil when you die."

The soldier, clearly uncomfortable, replies that the conversation will lead nowhere and asks her not to escalate the situation. She refuses to let it go, repeating that they came to her land and calling them enemies. The clip ends without any violence.

Where and when it was filmed

Henichesk is a small port town in Kherson Oblast, on the Sea of Azov where it meets the shallow Syvash lagoon. Before the war it had about 19,000 residents. It lies only a short drive from the boundary with Crimea, which Russia had annexed in 2014, and that is exactly why it fell so fast: Russian forces pushing north out of Crimea seized the town on 24 February 2022, the same day the video appeared.

The clip was shared that day by Hanna Liubakova, a Belarusian journalist, among many others, with the caption identifying Henichesk:

Look at this brave woman who openly asks a Russian soldier: "Why did you come to our country?"

This is Henichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov in Kherson Oblast of southern #Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/CU1MOS7L7q

— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) February 24, 2022

Henichesk was never retaken. After Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Kherson in November 2022, the Russian-installed authorities moved their regional administration to Henichesk, which has served as their temporary centre for the occupied part of the oblast since then.

What is known, and what is not

The woman has never been publicly identified, and early reports, including The Daily Beast's on the night of the invasion, described her simply as an unnamed resident. The location was widely reported as Henichesk, and Wikipedia's article on the town records the confrontation as part of its capture, but we found no forensic verification of the exact street. The English subtitles that circulated were made by social media users rather than a professional translator, so small differences in wording between versions are normal.

Many viral posts later claimed to know what happened to her afterwards. None of those claims was backed by reliable reporting, and they are best treated as unconfirmed. What the video does show clearly is a civilian confronting soldiers with words and nothing else, and soldiers who chose not to respond with force.

It is also worth saying plainly: confronting armed troops is extremely dangerous. The clip is admired for its courage, not as advice.

Why sunflower seeds?

The gesture worked because every Ukrainian watching understood it instantly. The sunflower is widely regarded as Ukraine's national flower, and the yellow fields under a blue sky echo the colours of the national flag. Sunflowers are also central to the country's farming economy. Ukraine was the world's second-largest producer of sunflower oil in 2022, behind only Russia, accounting for around a quarter of global output. When the invasion disrupted Black Sea trade, sunflower oil prices jumped by as much as 58% in a single month.

Roasted sunflower seeds, semechky, are also an everyday snack across Ukraine and Russia, the kind of thing people carry in a coat pocket. That everyday quality is what made the woman's words so cutting. She turned a familiar, homely object into a grim prediction: you will die here, and our flowers will grow from you.

How the moment became a symbol

Within days, sunflowers appeared on protest signs from London to Tokyo, in profile pictures and in fundraising campaigns for Ukraine. News outlets, including the South China Morning Post in a piece republished by ABS-CBN on 1 March 2022, wrote about how the sunflower had moved from national flower to emblem of resistance, and the Henichesk video was usually the story they began with.

Part of the clip's power was timing. It reached audiences abroad in the first confused hours of the invasion, before most people had seen images of the fighting itself. It offered a simple, human picture of how many Ukrainians felt: angry, unafraid, and certain the land was theirs. For many viewers it captured the gap between an army that called its invasion "exercises" and a population that rejected that description to its face.

The bigger picture

The Henichesk confrontation was one of many similar scenes in the first weeks of the war, when civilians in occupied towns blocked convoys, argued with soldiers and staged street protests. In the south, especially in Kherson and Melitopol, those protests were reportedly followed in later months by arrests and intimidation of activists. That context is a reminder that the woman's courage came at a moment of real danger, in a place that is still occupied today.

The video remains a short, unscripted record of the invasion's first day: a town falling, a soldier repeating that talking would achieve nothing, and a resident who refused to accept that.

Sources: Wikipedia: Henichesk; The Daily Beast (24 February 2022); ABS-CBN / South China Morning Post: How sunflowers became a symbol of Ukraine's resistance; Wikipedia: Sunflower oil; video shared by Hanna Liubakova on Twitter; earlier reported via 9GAG.