This issue of the London Ukrainian Review explores the topic of wartime childhood. Through reportage, conversations, history, and art, it highlights the experiences of young people growing up in Ukraine today, and of the adults responsible for protecting these children from Russia’s genocidal policy. This unflinching look at the Ukrainian present poses urgent questions about our shared future.
A wall next to a lyceum in central Lviv is marked with graffiti. In the centre, an inscription in purple and yellow reads: ‘Corona Graduates 2020’. To the left, a later graduating class wrote, ‘Victorious Graduation 2022’, with the word ‘Victorious’ in blue, ‘Graduation’ in yellow, and the year in red and black, the colours of a country on fire. To the right, graduates painted a map of the country, also in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. This wall is a snapshot of childhood in wartime Ukraine, the theme of this issue of the London Ukrainian Review.
Like the lives of children around the world, the lives of young Ukrainians who graduated in June 2022 had been disrupted first by the pandemic; what followed was not a rebuilding of normality but the all-out genocidal escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The war had been part of those teenagers’ childhood since the age of eight. Yet in May 2022, they believed they would emerge from it victorious, and that it would happen soon.
Emerge from the war, they have not. Victory seemed within reach in the spring of their graduation year, after the Ukrainian Armed Forces had liberated the Kyiv and Chernihiv regions; but it has been delayed by the inadequate international response to Russia’s aggression. Some of the 2022 graduates have already enlisted in the army. Some have left the country. Their defiant graduation message is both a fly in amber and a mirror held up to adults. We not only allowed the murderous aggressor to invade the young Ukrainians’ childhoods in 2022; we have also failed to stop the bloodshed and to bring Ukraine victory, thus restoring their faith in justice.
Wars disproportionately affect the most vulnerable. Children are seven times more likely than adults to die from explosion-related traumas, their smaller bodies being more prone to suffering multiple injuries, including deadly head injuries. [1] According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) report from April 2025, 701 children have been killed and 2032 injured in Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. [2] During the preparation of this issue, Russian missile and drone attacks have increased, making April 2025 the deadliest month for children since June 2022, with at least nineteen children killed, seventy-eight injured.
‘Maths is the queen of sciences and wars’, notes Ukrainian poet Olha Olkhova. Yet how do we compute grief from the loss of lives barely lived? How do we measure the desert left by such a loss?
In a leafy Kyiv neighbourhood hit by Russia with a North-Korean KN-23 missile on 24 April 2025, a makeshift memorial of toys and flowers stands next to a flattened residential building. The site is framed by the carcasses of burnt cars and the shattered windows of nearby houses. Kyiv’s essential chestnut trees are blooming, their battered ‘candles’ lit in mourning. Coming back to maths, thirteen civilians were killed in the strike, eighty-one injured. Coming back to grief, the body of seventeen-year-old Danylo Khudia was found under the rubble. While the rescue operations were ongoing, dozens of his schoolmates kept vigil at the site, hoping for a miracle, in vain. The alliance of Moscow and Pyongyang shattered their world.
Such extreme experiences have become common in Ukraine in the twelfth year of Russia’s war, which takes aim at Ukrainian children. Diana Deliurman investigates how children endure Russian attacks on civilians in the piece ‘Wounded Childhood: “Being a Kid” After Severe Trauma’. Her reportage gently follows two young Ukrainians who have sustained injuries and loss, and have also received support on their path towards recovery.
Russia’s systematic targeting of children is one sign of the genocidal intent of this war. Under Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the act of forcibly transferring a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’s children to another group constitutes genocide. Nearly twenty thousand Ukrainian children have been deported to the Russian Federation since February 2022. This figure encompasses only those cases where it was possible to verify personal data, while every effort is being made by the perpetrator to hide the evidence of their crimes. In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova (the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation) for the alleged war crime of unlawful deportation of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. This crime is at the heart of the conversation between Daria Herasymchuk, Advisor and Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children’s Rights, and Svitlana Osipchuk, Programme Director of the War Childhood Museum Ukraine.
Russia’s industrial-scale abduction of Ukrainian children is enabled by a wide-ranging, developed infrastructure that includes a network of summer camps inherited from the USSR. Iuliia Skubytska’s article ‘Instrumentalising Summer Camps in the Soviet Union and in Russia’s War against Ukraine’ helps us grasp the genealogy of Russia’s repressive apparatus employed for the deportation of young Ukrainians — and also for the erasure of their national identity.
Ukrainian documentary cinema of the past decade has fixed its gaze on the factors and circumstances shaping this identity, probing the challenges and choices encountered by young adults in independent Ukraine. Olga Birzul’s essay ‘Watching Ukrainians Grow Up: Documentaries about Young Adults’ delves into the political culture at the heart of both the experiences of adolescence and the films investigating the lives of young people in Ukraine.
‘We Are the Future’ is the title of a conversation piece emerging from an email exchange between two sixteen-year-old girls: one from London, the other from Bucha. From their responses to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, to music tastes and the necessity for civic engagement, the conversation the London Ukrainian Review set up between Daryna Rud and Emma Roberts brings forward not only gaps in experience but also some surprising similarities, thus charting a pathway to cross-cultural solidarity. While the girls immediately recognised what was common between them, the adults are yet to come to terms with the fact that it is not only Daryna’s but also Emma’s future that is currently at stake in Ukraine.
Keeping its commitment to contemporary Ukrainian poetry in translation, this issue sheds light on two young Ukrainian poets who chose to resist Russia’s invasion with arms and whose work engages deeply with the theme of childhood. Twenty-four-year-old Artur Dron’s poem ‘Children’, translated by Yuliya Musakovska, opens with the lines, ‘When we speak of hope | we’re actually speaking | of children’. Poet Maksym Kryvtsov enlisted at the age of twenty-four and was killed in action two weeks before his thirty-fourth birthday. In his poetry about the transformations of wartime childhood, translated by Larissa Babij and Helena Kernan, ‘the sun watches [us] without blinking’. So does the memory of Maksym Kryvtsov.
The image of the sun is a steady beam that runs through Stanislav Turina’s ink illustrations for this issue of the London Ukrainian Review. Bandaging wounds and accompanying on journeys, scanning lost possessions, and accidentally exposing the film of children’s lives, these doodle-like images remind us of the playfulness and innocence taken away by Russia’s war irrevocably. Shaken by the destruction of childhood and by children’s perseverance, we blink at this sun, our eyes naked and inflamed. We cannot hide from its glare, making plain our responsibility for bringing the perpetrator to justice.
Endnotes
[1] See Blast Injuries: The Impact of Explosive Weapons on Children in Conflict (Save the Children International, 2019), p. 7. https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/blast-injuries-impact-explosive-weapons-children-conflict [accessed 18 May 2025]
[2] See ‘Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict — April 2025’, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), April 2025. https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/Ukraine%20-%20protection%20of%20civilians%20in%20armed%20conflict%20%28April%20%202025%29_ENG.pdf [accessed 18 May 2025]
Sasha Dovzhyk is the Editor-in-chief of the London Ukrainian Review.
Image: Stanislav Turina, Drawing (special for the London Ukrainian Review), 2025
