Russia's youngest victims
Some are killed. Some are kidnapped. Almost all of Ukraine's children are psychologically damaged.
Someday, the Russian military will have been driven from every inch of Ukraine’s territory. And Russia will be forced to pay restitution for what it has destroyed in Ukraine, down to the last brick.
That’s for the physical damage, at least. No amount of rubles (or, considering the ruble will likely be useless, oil and other raw materials for rebuilding Ukraine) will adequately compensate for the lives lost and destroyed.
The artillery and missile attacks get all the attention, but Putin’s most shocking crime against humanity may be the wholesale kidnapping, brainwashing and “Russification” of Ukrainian children in territories under its control.
At least 6,000 children, and perhaps as many as 19,000, according to the Daily Mail:
The 15-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl was taken one warm morning last October.
Like everyone else in Kherson, a city on the estuary of the Dnipro river in southern Ukraine, Yevheniia's family were still adjusting to life under Russian control. Putin's tanks and troops had poured into the city seven months earlier, soon after the invasion of Ukraine began.
Now there were checkpoints, military police, rumours of Russian brutality; of women being raped. Ukraine was fighting to get the city back and there was a constant risk of shelling. Few people went out after 5pm.
In the apartment where the teenager lived with her mother Maryna, 37, a sales assistant in a clothes shop; her father Oleskii, 36, a sailor; and her seven-year-old sister, the atmosphere was tense. So when her teacher invited Yevheniia and her classmates on a two-week holiday in Crimea, on the Black Sea, she leapt at the chance.
'I was going far away from the war with my friends,' she tells me now.
[…]
After two weeks, Yevheniia was almost sad to go home. But then something unexpected happened. Her teacher said they weren't going home yet. The holiday would be extended by a week or so, she said. 'She did that a few times, again and again,' Yevheniia recalls.
She then learnt the truth. A Russian assistant secretly gathered the children in small groups. He told them to forget any idea of an extended holiday. 'You are here,' he told them, 'because you can't leave this place.'
Some of these Ukrainian children have been taken to psychiatric hospitals in Ukraine. Just like Putin’s beloved USSR did, with adult dissidents.1
And the “Russification” is just a particularly harsh tactic in a project the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union implemented in its colonies for centuries - suppression of languages and cultures, moving ethnic Russian settlers by the millions into other nations, and never letting the Estonians and Ukrainians and Kazakhs and Poles forget who was boss.
As I have written many times, I cannot abide wholesale demonization of Russian people, especially when it’s directed at Russians fighting against the Putin regime and its genocidal war. But none of this emerged in a vacuum.
It’s also something to keep in mind when people call for some kind of settlement that allows Russia to keep territories it has already “won” since 2014. While Putin and his military have fallen far short of their goals, millions of Ukrainians live under Russian rule, and at this stage, “armistice” is a synonym for abandoning them.
Even the Ukrainian children who have so far survived the war, and have not been taken into Russian captivity, have experienced psychological shocks from which they’ll need years to recover. If that’s even possible.
One organization has set up a camp in the mountains of Western Ukraine, to give war-scarred children a respite. Unlike the ones in Crimea, this appears to be an actual holiday camp, not a detention center with some nice beaches:
At first, they seemed like a perfectly ordinary group of children as they got off the bus at the Alpine-style resort in the mountains of western Ukraine. But the psychologists and teachers waiting to greet them soon noticed something was not quite right.
Some were so withdrawn they barely spoke. Others would get into fights without provocation, or throw tantrums. Girls would randomly burst into tears and refuse to eat.
“They were all mentally and psychologically exhausted,” said Dmytro Vitvitsky, who was there that day. “Their nerves were shattered.”
The group was part of an innovative program aimed at helping Ukrainian children living on the front lines of the ongoing war with Russia. Created by a Ukrainian NGO based in the western city of Lviv, it brought psychologists, educators and physical therapists together to help treat them for a host of ailments caused by living under daily bombardment.
[…]
The children come from regions where fighting is still raging — Kharkiv, Donetsk and Luhansk in the east, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv and Kherson in the south. They spend up to 15 hours a day in bomb shelters and cellars when Russian forces bombard their towns with rockets, drones and artillery.
“There were kids who were afraid of unfamiliar sounds and loud noises,” said Tishchenko. “There were those who didn’t want to sit with their backs to the window, or to the door. There were kids who were constantly hugging, because you have to look for protection when there’s the uncertainty of what’s going on behind your back.”
It’s well known that children suffer psychological trauma in conflict zones, but it’s less recognized that they can suffer chronic physical ailments as well.
“They have lung problems from being in shelters that aren’t properly ventilated. They’re breathing in toxic gases that are released from explosions,” said Vitvitsky, a former university professor who created and ran the program. “Their vision deteriorates from being in the darkness, staring at screens. They have back problems from hunching over in shelters. They have poor motor skills from lack of movement.”
Social isolation makes it worse. Schools in front line areas never went back to in-person learning after Covid because of the war, with the result that children are in their fourth year of online education. Gyms and sports arenas have been destroyed. Mines and unexploded ordnance are everywhere.
“There are a lot of cases where unexploded shells go off,” said Victoria Avramenko, who worked as a mentor in the program. She is herself from a town, Snihurivka, that was under Russian occupation last year. “Parents try to make sure the child does not walk anywhere, or go outside by themselves. It is hard, very hard. It affects the children very much. I can see it in my own child,” she said.
“There’s basically no in-person social life for these children,” said Vitvitsky.
On top of this, many of the children are struggling with overwhelming loss. Some have parents who have disappeared or are stranded in areas under Russian occupation. Some have had to take on the role of parent themselves to younger siblings.
“There was a boy whose father was a soldier who died on the front lines just before he arrived at the camp,” said Avramenko. “He was trying as hard as he could to put on a brave face with the other children. But at one point he just ran to his room and cried into his pillow.”
Here in North America, our own children had to go through a period of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects will be debated for decades to come, but even if you agreed with closing schools and masking requirements (justifiable, at least for a while) and sealing off playgrounds (um…not so much) you remember that it was a stressful time for parents and children alike.
Now, add to that constant bombing and shelling, and a (slowly) advancing hostile army, and you can just barely begin to understand what’s been experienced by Ukrainian children.
And that came after they went through a COVID-19 lockdown period in their own right.
As with every other nation unfortunate enough to border Russia (and that goes double for those located between Russia and Germany) Ukraine has had an extremely tumultuous history. But it has endured. In the thirties and forties it went through a Moscow-orchestrated famine, political purges, Nazi occupation that at least equalled and in some ways surpassed the horrors inflicted upon them by Stalin, and arguably the most destructive fighting in the history of warfare.
But Ukraine is still here.
Ukrainians’ history has made them tough and tenacious. It’s just a tragedy that, even now, their children have to grow up so fast.
Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Soviets did this to children, too. After all, one of the Bolsheviks’ first grand statements was murdering politically inconvenient teenagers.
Either way: once a KGB man, always a KGB man.