Ukraine’s Children Forge Resilience Amid Relentless War

Izium, Vinnytsia, and Kamianske, Ukraine
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Oct. 07, 2026, 4:35 p.m. ET

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8 min read

When the air-raid siren wails over Izium, the children drop their drawing pens, glue tubes, and felt-tipped scissors in unison and sprint for the door. With practiced urgency, they crowd into a nearby stairwell in the Soviet-era community center. The day before, alerts had driven them into this musty alcove four times in three hours. Now, seated hip-to-hip on wooden steps, they play games, talk, and joke as if still at their craft tables.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine grinds into its fifth year, war is no longer a temporary emergency. It has become the fabric of daily life for an entire nation. For many children, it is the only life they have ever known.

“Children here know they must not stand in front of windows, and they need to hide,” says Olesia Biliaha, the lead instructor at the community center’s charity arts, dance, and computer program.

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Ukrainian Emergency Service workers clear rubble from the Izium Comprehensive School No. 12 in Izium, Ukraine, Sept. 26, 2022.

For this generation, the war’s toll is measured in empty playgrounds, lost school years, and loved ones who will never return. The numbers are staggering: 2.6 million displaced children and 1 million textbooks destroyed by Russian bombs.

Barely 20 miles from the eastern front line, Izium embodies what the war has stolen. School is entirely remote. Anti-drone netting drapes streets where children once roamed freely. Yet even here, in the heart of Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II, children display remarkable resilience. As sirens wail, Anzhela wraps her arms supportively around the shoulders of her 7-year-old friend, Mira.

“Children cope,” says Ms. Biliaha. “They adapt.”

To understand how Ukraine’s children are adapting, the Monitor revisited three communities living with the reality that Russia’s war is unlikely to end soon.

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Ukrainian choreographer and instructor Olesia Biliaha encourages children taking part in a race with blocks onstage, during an arts, dance, and computer learning program supporting children in front-line communities.

Education Under Fire

Many children in the stairwell were toddlers when Russian troops occupied Izium for six months beginning in April 2022. The occupiers converted schools into fighting positions and surgical stations, and imported Russian toys and notebooks as part of a plan to replace the Ukrainian curriculum with a pro-Russia version.

A Ukrainian counteroffensive drove them out, but the city and its people were battered. When the community center’s children’s program began, the building’s broken windows were still boarded up, and rooms were lit by flashlights.

The children had “no socializing experience, no kindergarten,” recalls Inna Honcharova, the program director. During the occupation, families frequently lived without electricity, gas, heat, and water, keeping their children off the streets for fear of Russian soldiers.

Their experience is far from unique. According to UNICEF, roughly 40% of Ukrainian children ages 3 to 6 do not attend preschool, up from 15% before the war, cutting them off from peers at a developmental stage when play is essential for social and emotional growth.

Older children face parallel academic and social losses. Air raids force Ukrainian students to miss an average of 20% of their classes. To circumvent the problem, one in three children now attends school fully or partially online, and some front-line cities have built schools in underground bunkers. Yet it is insufficient. As of 2025, Ukraine’s children lagged an average of two years behind in reading and one year behind in math.

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Ukrainian children take part in a charity arts, dance, and computer program under the guidance of instructor Olesia Biliaha in Izium, 20 miles from Ukraine’s eastern front line.

In Izium, in-person schooling remains impossible. The threat of Russian strikes is so persistent that the local school system is constructing its first fully underground school.

In this context, the community center serves as an oasis. Funded primarily by the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, the program offers beading, Plasticine sculpting, dance classes, and dedicated mental-relaxation sessions where children sit on mats donated by Ukrainians living in Los Angeles and simply do nothing.

“The kids have the ability here to talk to each other, to be with each other, and it’s very important to them,” says Ms. Biliaha, the choreographer and teacher. About 55 such charity arts programs operate across Ukraine to support communities near the front lines, Ms. Honcharova says.

“Now you see how drastic the change is,” she says of the children’s social progress. “The change is great.”

Yet just a day after the Monitor’s visit in late July, two Russian aerial bombs struck a kindergarten in a nearby district, prompting the center to close for two weeks, according to Ms. Biliaha. Then a bomb landed 500 yards from the building, and another just 200 yards away.

Now the closure, like Russia’s war against Ukraine itself, has become indefinite.

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Yulianna Palahniuk was only 6 years old when she lost her father, 1st Lt. Oleksandr Palahniuk, in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Weight of Memory

Ukraine’s children have lost not only years of education to Russian bombs. One in five children in the country — more than a million total — have lost a relative or friend, according to UNICEF.

On Yulianna Palahniuk’s sixth birthday in May 2022, she waited eagerly for a call from her father, Oleksandr. He had recently deployed as an airborne assault soldier in the northeast, but they spoke regularly by phone. When the call didn’t come, Yulianna asked her mother, Zhanna, why.

“Your father is already an angel,” Zhanna explained.

In an instant, what remained of Yulianna’s peacetime childhood evaporated. As Russian bombs continued to fall, her emotions became volatile. “She had problems in school, a very hot temper, and when she came home, she was already charged with that energy,” says Mrs. Palahniuk.

She was far from alone. The mental health of Ukraine’s children has been severely shaken. One study found that 32% of teenagers show signs of moderate or severe depression, while the Ukrainian mental health nonprofit Voices for Children estimates that one in two children in the country exhibit symptoms of anxiety.

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Four years later, Yulianna Palahniuk and her mother, Zhanna, are still making sense of their lives without 1st Lt. Oleksandr Palahniuk.

For years after her father’s death, Yulianna continued to dream of him coming home, “and she was devastated by that,” Zhanna recalls. The girl’s nails were ragged from biting, and Zhanna struggled to balance her daughter’s grief alongside her own. She had a recurring fear that they would be separated during a Russian strike, and “I will not be on time to find her.”

As the war’s death toll mounts, rehabilitation programs for Ukrainians traumatized by conflict and grieving loved ones are becoming more common. Last spring, Yulianna and Zhanna participated in a two-week session in Lithuania called “Children of Heroes” with 20 other families. There, mother and daughter wept and composed letters to each other.

“I hope that you will become normal,” Yulianna wrote in hers.

“We both learned there are ways to talk to each other,” says Mrs. Palahniuk. Within months, she also began dating a devout Christian named Zhenya. Tentatively, Yulianna began to make space for a new father figure in her heart, adding Zhenya to her bedtime prayers. With him around, “the negative energy in our home disappeared,” Mrs. Palahniuk says.

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Zhanna Palahniuk, widow of 1st Lt. Oleksandr Palahniuk, and Mykhailo Palahniuk, father of the airborne officer, visit the veteran soldier’s grave in his home village of Pokutyne, south of Vinnytsia, in July 2026.

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Family photos sit alongside medals and military certificates in Lieutenant Palahniuk’s former bedroom.

But her father, Sasha — as Oleksandr was known — remains a presence in Yulianna and her mother’s lives. In his home village, a two-hour drive south of Vinnytsia, the family has turned his former room into a shrine, with photographs, certificates, and medals. Sometimes Yulianna and her mother lay flowers on his grave up the road, a granite memorial etched with his image.

At age 10, Yulianna is round-faced and a head taller than most peers. Yet sometimes, in her mind, she is still the little girl her father once pulled out of kindergarten for a secret visit to his military base. His fellow soldiers fawned over the freckled 5-year-old. That was half her life ago, but the emotional charge of that day has never dulled.

“I felt like a queen!” she says.

A Home That No Longer Exists

Serhii Yeroshenko will never have memories of the place he comes from. He was just 2½ years old in 2024 when his family fled their spacious apartment in the southeastern coal-mining town of Myrnohrad as a Russian ground advance crept within three miles of their home.

At the time, his mother, Irina Yeroshenko, coordinated volunteer evacuation and rescue teams for Caritas and Search Donbas, helping many children and families escape the advancing front. The work alleviated her own depression and gave her insight into the risks of staying too long as danger closed in.

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Serhii and his mother, Irina Yeroshenko, play on the grounds of a church in Kamianske, during a program run by the charity Caritas-Spes for children displaced from Ukraine’s eastern front line, July 21, 2026.

With Russians capturing village after village near Myrnohrad, Serhii’s older sister, Kamila Voytenko, then 17, watched friends and classmates flee one by one. Meanwhile, Russian bombardments intensified daily, along with the family’s stress. “You … realize you enter this beautiful period of teenage life, and you have no idea if you will see [friends] again,” Ms. Voytenko says.

Today, more than a third of Ukrainian children — about 2.6 million — live in exile. Some 800,000, like Serhii, are displaced within the country. The rest are refugees, mostly in neighboring European nations.

As Russian troops closed in, Irina, Serhii, and Kamila finally left Myrnohrad, settling 150 miles west in Kamianske.

Although Serhii understood little of what was happening, he was visibly unmoored. Irina says he “started to panic and to cry a lot” each time she tried to carry him inside their tiny new one-bedroom apartment. That first day, they bought candies and sat on a bench outside, trying to soothe Serhii, who refused their efforts. They stayed on the street until 11 p.m., when he finally fell asleep and could be carried inside.

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Serhii Yeroshenko (from left), along with his mother, Irina Yeroshenko, and older sister, Kamila Voytenko, fled Myrnohrad in mid-2024 as Russian troops advanced.

At nursery school, he barely spoke or interacted with other children. Mrs. Yeroshenko says she began to see that even though Serhii was very young, “all of those explosions, all of those things we went through together that I thought did not influence him” in Myrnohrad were having a profound effect.

Then, tentatively, Serhii began molding himself into his new life. Now 4, he attends kindergarten and the children’s program run by the Catholic charity Caritas-Spes. In these moments, as he plays hide-and-seek with friends in a church courtyard and bobs for plastic fish in a bucket with a toy rod, his life looks as it might have before the war.

But watching him, Irina mourns the home Serhii will never see. “What hurts now is we are left without our city,” she says. “I won’t be able to take Serhii to some street and say, ‘This is the place where I met your father.’ … It just doesn’t exist anymore.”

Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.

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