Putin's War Is Having a Devastating Impact on Ukraine's Children

More than a year on, Russian President Vladimir Putin's war continues to have a devastating impact across all sectors of Ukrainian society. Among the hardest hit—Ukraine's children.

Russia has "stolen Ukrainian children in an attempt to steal Ukraine's future," U.S. President Joe Biden said in remarks ahead of the one-year anniversary of the war, on February 24. "[Russia] bombed train stations, maternity hospitals, schools, and orphanages."

Biden's remarks came ahead of a damning ruling from the International Criminal Court (ICC), which made Putin a global outlaw on March 17 when he was accused of the illegal deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia during his full-scale invasion of the neighboring country.

The ICC also issued an arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner for Children's Rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation. According to the court, she and Putin are personally responsible for the forced deportation of children from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia.

Over 16,000 children are believed to have been illegally transferred to Russia or Ukrainian regions that are partially controlled by Russian forces, according to Ukraine government figures.

The war in Ukraine has also hampered education for millions of children, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) warned in January, noting that since the war began, over 2,600 schools have been damaged and over 400 destroyed across Ukraine.

The humanitarian aid organization said the war has put at risk education and the future of children in Ukraine, and that some 5.3 million children face barriers preventing access to education, including 3.6 million children directly affected by school closures.

Only approximately 25 percent of Ukrainian schools nationwide have been able to offer full-time, in-person learning since September 2022, and fewer than half of families with children under 5 years old were able to return to kindergarten and join educational activities, UNICEF found.

Meanwhile, damage to schools and power cuts following attacks on critical infrastructure have also hindered children's ability to access education in-person and online, putting the future of millions of children at risk, the organization said.

The Ukraine Children's Action Project (UCAP), a United States-based non-profit organization, has been working since May 2022 to piece the lives of Ukrainian children back together, raising funds to assist Ukrainian programs supporting children who have experienced psychological trauma or who are not able to continue their education.

A recent project of theirs—donating refurbished school buses to replace the buses destroyed throughout Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

UCAP purchased and refurbished six school buses in Poland, and donated them on Monday to Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine, located between the capital, Kyiv, and the Belarus border in north-central Ukraine. The city was one of the first regions to be occupied by Russian forces in the spring of 2022.

Irwin Redlener, the co-founder of UCAP, told Newsweek that Russians stole or destroyed thousands of vehicles, leaving children no mode of transportation to school.

Redlener said there has been rampant random destruction by Russia in general, of buildings, including hospitals, but particularly schools.

"The schools seem to have been deliberately targeted throughout Ukraine," he said. "I think the Russians fully understand the impact of destroying schools. It's a direct threat to children. It's a direct strategy to undermine a sense of cultural cohesiveness. And I think this is intentional."

The trauma of this war, and its impact on the country's children, Redlener, said will greatly harm the future ability of Ukraine to recover.

"The suffering in Ukraine, for example, is shared among the entire population, the adults, the children, the military. But the thing about the children is that they represent the future of the country," he said.

Ukraine's children are personally affected when they have prolonged trauma, severe trauma, and educational disruption, which are "the two things that I'm most concerned about. There's no easy remediation," Redlener said. "At the end of this, and at some point, it will end, the recovery of Ukraine, as a nation, will be really dependent on the capacity of the next generation to function optimally."

Redlener said that based on conversations he's had with Ukrainian schoolchildren, there's great frustration among these youth about the impact the war has had on their education.

"A Ukrainian girl had to leave Ukraine at the beginning of her last year of school, and she had plans to go to the university in Ukraine," he said. "She wanted to be going into marketing and now all of a sudden, here she is, in Poland, not knowing when or if she'll return to Ukraine having no idea what she's going to be doing."

He added: "Kids are frustrated and they're angry in some cases. This is like a cultural societal time bomb for Ukraine, and this is something we need to address now."

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