Ukrainian children are a frequent target of Russian attacks on civilians. How do children wounded by the aggressor state recover from their trauma? How do Ukrainian parents provide support when Russia has made safety impossible? Diana Deliurman reports on Ukrainian kids who have endured injury, loss, rehabilitation, and made it back to childhood — transformed.
Sunlight poured in through the sanctuary’s large windows. Adults and children sat in the church pews. In wartime, you should stay away from glass surfaces, but these people had no choice. Their apartments were in ruins, and the bombing and street battles in Mariupol were relentless. In March 2022, this church with a basement near the Azovstal metallurgical plant was a safe haven.
The people listened intently to the pastor. He wasn’t talking about the Holy Scripture, he was explaining how to get out of the besieged city. His speech was cut short by the roar of a fighter jet, an explosion, and shattering glass. Of all the people in the church, thirteen-year-old Alisa sustained the greatest injury from the blast wave: a glass fragment sliced into the back of her head.
‘I went down into the basement, all covered in blood. The only thing they could do was disinfect the wound with zelenka [1] and bandage it up’, recalled the girl. She added, ‘Good thing the wound wasn’t deep. That wouldn’t have been cool.’
The girl needed stitches but the grown-ups were at a loss: where and how? This airstrike was the last straw. Everyone who had taken refuge in the church, all fifteen of them, decided to escape from Mariupol. There was only one way out — through occupied territory and then to Russia. With a makeshift white flag, the group set off on foot toward Novoazovsk, a town on the border with Russia. Alisa remembers walking for three hours in unrelenting pain.
When the group reached Novoazovsk, the Russian occupying forces took them into custody. Instead of bringing Alisa to a hospital, they sent her to a filtration camp. [2] There she was questioned by members of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Men in balaclavas asked the thirteen-year-old, ‘Does your dad drive a tank? Do you have videos of street fighting?’
Both Alisa and her mother went through Russian filtration three times before they were free to start their lives over in Kyiv. Now Alisa is sixteen, and she’s preparing to enrol in an arts college to study graphic design. She attends school online and also has a job. Speaking softly, the girl says she considers herself independent. Her appearance is louder: she has short, dyed hair, a lip piercing, and several tattoos. Alisa has lots of friends, and they all sport the same style. Not all of them know about her trauma, but hanging out with them helps her cope with what she has been through.
Children need something to anchor them after serious trauma. The double impact of physical and psychological trauma disturbs a child’s fundamental sense of safety in the world, explains psychologist Serhiy Mykhailyk of the Voices of Children Charitable Foundation. It leads to the realisation, ‘Even my parents can’t protect me from harm.’ And then defence mechanisms like hyper-vigilance and various fears get activated.
‘A child’s mind is more sensitive than an adult’s, but it is also more plastic. This means it can recover more quickly with the right kind of support from specialists and parental figures’, says Mykhailyk.
Over the past few years, dozens of organisations in Ukraine have directed their resources to helping wounded children. Their specialists could have been helping kids find their calling or develop their artistic talents; instead, all their efforts now go to helping children recover — physically and psychologically — from war-related trauma. New rehabilitation centres for children have opened in cities throughout Ukraine, including a special department of the Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv and UNBROKEN KIDS at the St Nicholas Children’s Hospital in Lviv. These two centres dedicated to giving children wounded by war another chance at childhood are unique in their scale. But the need for similar institutions keeps growing.
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Yaroslav Oleksiv, a dean at the Lviv National Music Academy, gave up everything to save his son Romchyk [diminutive of Roman — Ed.]. ‘Every father would do the same’, he says.
Oleksiv’s wife, Halyna, and their seven-year-old son ended up in the epicentre of a Russian missile strike. Halyna had taken the boy to the Neuromed clinic in Vinnytsia on the morning of 14 July 2022 — the day the Russian military attacked this city far from the front lines, taking everyone by surprise. A high-precision missile hit the hospital building right next to a bustling shopping centre. Halyna was killed instantly. Romchyk managed to escape the blazing building, but he sustained severe burns and injuries.
Breathing with the help of a ventilator, the boy was evacuated to Germany for specialised treatment. This was the start of his long journey to recovery.
For the first hundred days, Romchyk lay immobile in the hospital. Before he was injured, the boy had played the accordion and enjoyed ballroom dancing. Now the doctors weren’t sure if he would ever walk again. After Romchyk’s condition stabilised, following numerous operations, he was moved from the hospital to a rehabilitation centre near Dresden. There, in the courtyard, he relearned how to walk. He would get up, take one painful step, and then sit down to rest. His father told him, ‘If you want to return to Ukraine, you have to be able to walk, you have to be strong.’ Motivated by the dream of going home, Romchyk would take one step more each day. It wasn’t long before he could go without a wheelchair.
‘After a month and a half, we walked five kilometres together without stopping’, recalled his father, Yaroslav.
Romchyk’s most severe burns were on his hands. The skin between his fingers grew back unevenly, so the doctors had to cut it and graft on new skin. They would bend his fingers to keep them supple and stretch his palms wide, which was especially painful for the boy. Despite the pain, he had to recover his fine motor skills. The boy’s father decided it was time for Romchyk to get back to the accordion: he might find playing the instrument more fun than physical therapy.
‘Children naturally use play and creativity for recovery’, explains Mykhailyk. ‘These are safe ways to work through trauma.’
Every three months, Romchyk would have surgery on his more injured hand; afterwards, it was set in a cast. When the cast was removed, his father would sit him down with the accordion. Without regular practice, it was hard to remember the melodies and the boy’s fingers would grow stiff. But father and son persisted. Every time was like starting from scratch. Yet their efforts paid off. Since Romchyk’s last operation, he now has the stamina to play for a few hours per day. Recently, Romchyk took part in his first music competition since before his injury. [3]
Romchyk spent two-and-a-half years at the rehabilitation centre in Germany. Between operations, the boy led an ordinary life with a packed schedule. Every day, he had doctors’ visits, attended German school, and studied in Ukrainian with a tutor. In his free time, the boy and his father gave interviews and spoke at public events about Ukraine. Romchyk’s story has travelled the world.
The boy and his father recently returned to Ukraine. Romchyk is still very busy, but at home he has time to hang out with his friends. This opportunity to be with them is what motivated Romchyk to heed his father’s words and work hard in Germany to recover. Yaroslav has finally seen the sparkle reappear in his son’s eyes. It looks like he is happy and feels like a kid again.
‘I hope he can maintain this attitude. If so, he’ll be able to get through anything and the rest of his rehabilitation will be a breeze’, Yaroslav believes.
The final stage of psychological rehabilitation, according to Mykhailyk, is being able to construct a positive vision of the future. Romchyk has recovered some of the things Russia’s missile attack took from him: spending time with his friends, playing the accordion, and ballroom dancing. He still hasn’t decided what he wants to do in the future, but it will be his choice.
For now, as long as Romchyk is still growing, he will need to undergo new operations at the very least until he reaches adulthood.
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Over 2000 children have been wounded as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to data collected by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights through the end of April 2025. The number of child casualties from Russian military attacks keeps growing, while the figures reported by monitoring missions are always out-dated. As soon as one report is published, news of yet another attack that wounded children fills the airwaves. Many of those wounded children will spend decades in treatment and rehabilitation, if not their whole lives, while their parents will try to reinstate their children’s fundamental right to childhood.
Who doesn’t have a scar on their knee with a story behind it? Like all children before, generations of children to come will keep falling on their knees. I remember falling once while running around outside with the neighbourhood kids. It hurt. And it hurt even more when I imagined my upcoming family vacation to the Black Sea coast and how the saltwater would sting my wound. I gritted my teeth and plunged into the water again and again. My ten-year-old self decided that I would not let the pain stop me from enjoying my time at the beach. The skin around my scar quickly grew tan in the summer sun. Years later, when I look at that barely visible scar, vivid memories come flooding back — of that summer, my friends, and the roar of the sea.
Injuries are a normal part of growing up. Children break an arm on the playground or get bruised while playing tag. They spoil their eyesight playing computer games. But injuries should not be caused by enemy missiles.
What stories will the children who survived Russia’s war on Ukraine tell about their scars?
Endnotes
[1] Zelenka is the colloquial Ukrainian for ‘brilliant green’, a chemical dye used widely in diluted form as a topical antiseptic in the Soviet Union (and later in post-Soviet countries).
[2] Filtration camps belong to the network of compulsory security screening facilities built by Russia’s authorities for the processing, detention, and interrogation of Ukrainians fleeing the occupied territories, which often result in severe ill-treatment and deportations to Russia.
[3] After this essay was written, on 8 April 2025, Euromaidan press reported that ten-year-old Roman Oleksiv won the InterSvitiaz Accomusic 2025 international accordion competition.
Diana Deliurman is a journalist and photographer. She specialises in reporting on Russia’s war crimes against Ukrainians and the war’s impact on culture and children. Her articles have been published in Ukrainian media outlets such as Frontliner, Suspilne, The Ukrainians, and Radio Liberty. Since 2025, she has been the Global Communications Manager at Lviv Media Forum.
Image: Stanislav Turina, Drawing (special for the London Ukrainian Review), 2025
