Almost one child per second is becoming a refugee from Russia’s war against Ukraine. This startling statistic from the United Nations comes as two thirds have already been displaced.
Mira and her younger brother Darik are the children of my friend’s family. They were ready to leave their home at the right moment thanks to information about a possible impending war, which had been prevalent in the media for several months.
Mira knew that her community had been shelled and the windows in her house blown out. She is still afraid of the sound of planes and she follows the news every day on television and online. The family cannot sleep as they still don’t feel safe, despite being thousands of miles away.
“We can take them out of the war, but we can’t take the war out of them. It’s inside,” says Mira’s mother Julia, a psychoanalyst from Switzerland where the family is now registering for refugee status.
Julia spends a lot of time these days just talking to her children. It helps them to work out the trauma of losing their homes, their friends, their lives and their overall stability and familiar societal support.
But none of this compares to those children who have been orphaned, wounded, or tortured. As-yet untold stories cannot be counted the shock endured for so many will undoubtedly leave lifelong trauma.
“They live through war from which they have nowhere to hide,” says Mykola Kuleba, former commissioner of the president of Ukraine for children’s rights. These days he takes families with children out of the shelling zones in an armored car.
“The children are panicked, confused and disoriented. I see their eyes full of pain and horror, so the main thing is to tell them clearly what we’re doing and where we’re going. They are beginning to trust us, though no one can guarantee anything,” says Kuleba, adding that the worst thing he has seen was a child being shot in the head.
Together with their parents, children evacuating from war-torn areas are now in a state of near constant anxiety. At present, it’s hard to even realize the scale of the tragedy, let alone count the number of victims. It will be much harder to understand how deeply the trauma of war will affect Ukraine’s children in the longer term and how to heal the war scars. For many, their childhoods have been brutally taken away, and they are bereft of all the joyful things they had before.
The mother of one 11-year old boy, Maksym, does not want to talk much these days. Together, they managed to leave Donetsk Region fast when Russian bombs started to fall after Feb. 24. She sighs deeply and sounds overtired on the phone.
In the western Ukrainian city to which the family had moved to hide from the war, Maksym wrote an ad offering his services. The list included taking out trash, walking dogs and bringing water. He asks 16-80 cents for his work and gives all the money to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“I want peace, serenity and health. Peace is when no one beats anyone and everyone lives like a family,” Maksym explains to me over the phone.
He dreams to draw professional cartoons about his life and believes he will come home in two months.
Julia’s children also badly want to return home.
“Mira told me she’s ready to go to work on a construction site to re-build Ukraine,” Julia says.
She expects the war will cause lasting trauma that will pass down through generations, as was the case following World War II.
