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The playground in Kostyantynivka is well maintained, despite being in the middle of the war and the crumbling post-industrial landscape of the eastern city.
A group of colorfully painted concrete lions greet children and their parents who enter the winter frontier in search of some normalcy.
Located across the street from the Eastern Ukrainian city’s music conservatory, the tree-lined park has everything you could want: a slide, a turnstyle, a yellow-painted climbing structure and a swing, one of which needs lube when you fall asleep. Saturday.
Under a weak gray sky, old people with strollers, elderly people and a few couples live, the cries of happy children mingle with the deep rumble and rumble of artillery shells.
Nothing terrible. No one looked. No one noticed. Everyone does it, head bowed as if it were the soundtrack of life’s routine.
On that day, the artillery of Russia and Ukraine – less than 20 kilometers away – held a duel, one of the clashes apparently will not end in the maelstrom that has been close to the Battle of Bakhmut, in the eastern Donbas region.
“Life is hard now,” said Lairisa, the grandmother, with a kind face and brown eyes that seemed to be constantly crying. “There are explosions every night. In our building, we don’t have windows in the hallways.”
He stood outside the music conservatory arm in arm with his 13-year-old granddaughter, Dariya, who was calm, matter-of-fact and hard-eyed. Both asked that their last names not be used for safety reasons.
“I don’t talk about war with my friends, but when we talk about it, we usually talk about horror,” said Dariya, who is in seventh grade and attends online classes.
Saturdays were usually spent at the music conservatory, but on this day, the two men also took food supplies in a bright yellow box with a blue Ukrainian trident stamp.
Lairisa just burst with praise for her granddaughter, saying how she was a calming presence during the attack when they took to shelter. He said he didn’t know how to explain to Dariya why the fight was going on.
‘I don’t think about the future’
He is not alone. Many parents – still processing their own trauma – often struggle to know what to say about the horrific violence that permeates their lives.
Lairisa’s grandson is a good student, a creative soul who loves music and art, he added, so he took music lessons.
Asked about her dreams for the future, Dariya replied: “I don’t think about the future.”
Like their parents and grandparents, children on the front lines and elsewhere in Ukraine have their lives cut short today.
Dariya, in some respects, may be lucky because she still has a home to go to. According to the United Nations, two-thirds of children in Ukraine have been displaced from their homes, either within the country or as refugees in other countries.
The war has disrupted the schools and lives of more than five million young people, endangering entire generations, UNICEF said in a statement published on January 23.
Other organizations remain concerned.
“The war in Ukraine has devastated children,” said the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović. “Council of Europe member states must redouble their efforts to protect and support children who are suffering as a result of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine.”
Children, almost every day, are traumatized by violence that cannot be dealt with. Some are wounded and killed. The Ukrainian government estimated last week that the war – which began when Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022 – had killed 1,388 children.
Friends were scattered because of the war
There was no artillery exchange outside the evacuation shelter in Dnipro, 240 kilometers west of Kostyantynivka.
Life for the children there, while far from normal, remains in a bright, clean, renovated but crowded Soviet-era school.
Families, fleeing violence in the east, use shelters as way stations while they register and find jobs and their own apartments in the city. Tucked into a tight space, in a dormitory-style room, the children, with their new friends, let off some energy in the large playroom that is their school.
Tumbling between large beanbag pillows and somersaulting across the room is 12-year-old Sophia (who also asked that we only use her first name because of safety concerns), who was evacuated to Dnipro with her parents from the eastern city of Severodonetsk.
He said there was time to play, despite the threat of airstrikes and rocket attacks on the city.
There was no time to think about her life at home, Sophia said, except to wonder where her friends from Severodonetsk were and whether they were all right.
His friends, along with his family, have been scattered to the winds by the war. When they try to stay in touch, it’s difficult and often frustrating – and they worry.
But what scared Sophia the most was the constant air raids. “At that time, I thought about how not to die here,” he said.
Elsewhere in the shelter, Volodymyr Krylov, a children’s boxing coach from Kremmina, talks to his son, Artem, about the future. He proudly held a phone showing a photo of Artem at a junior boxing tournament in Kyiv, taken last fall.
“My son dedicates all the victories to the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” Krylov said.
Artem, who is also 12 years old, confidently talks about how – one day – he will become a world boxing champion, but when the subject turns to fighting, he looks down on the floor.
“I don’t talk about war because when I do it’s sad,” he said. “I just want this to all be over so I can go home to my kittens and grandma.”
Once a boxing coach, Krylov said he told his son everything about victory and belief.
Go to shelter now ‘normal’
Further north and west in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine hundreds of kilometers from the fierce fighting in the east, but still facing missile attacks. It was a far cry from the early days of the war when the Russians were beaten back from the city gates.
Mariia Ionova, a European Solidarity Party member of parliament in the Ukrainian parliament, has a 15-year-old daughter and a four-year-old son. He brought a video of his son, sitting in a booster seat in the car, singing a popular Ukrainian victory song, until he insisted he turn off the camera.
“Every year, I feel like I’m a politician instead of a mother,” Ionova said, discounting another burden that parents bear – balancing a precarious life with the desire for their children.
It was difficult, she said, to witness the confusion, pain and frustration as her children tried to process what was happening around them. It was especially heartbreaking for his son, Oleksandr.
“They asked why, why, why sent police rockets? Ionova said. “So, this question remains because they don’t know why.”
What seemed to worry him was that if the war continued for a long time, he would get used to it. Ionova said she has seen a change in her son over the past year and how he has become used to air raids.
“When he entered kindergarten, he went to regular kindergarten, and he went to the shelter, now for him, for him, it’s normal,” he said.
More and more children are seeking help
Child psychologist Tetiana Aslanian has treated children traumatized by war since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the outbreak of fighting in the eastern Donbas region.
He said he had been carefully monitoring the evolution of the mental crisis as it spread across the country after last year’s comprehensive invasion.
Requests for help, online or by phone, have skyrocketed – and with some parents unwilling or unable to talk about what’s happening, there’s an unusual trend.
“We’ve found more and more kids are seeking help on their own — calling the helpline without their parents knowing,” Aslanian said. “This is very new to our community, and very important to you [and the world] to know and understand.”
The most surprising thing, he said, is that the number of children who may have committed suicide during therapy has been extraordinary.
“We have a portion of our clients, teenagers who ask us if they think about death,” Aslanian said. “They didn’t have enough resources to live through what happened. They didn’t have family support or lost people.”
Children find other ways to express themselves – usually through art.
Lena Rozvadovska, child advocate, journalist and head of the Voices of Children charity, has collected examples of these artworks. CBC News has also photographed dozens of children’s artworks in places like Kherson and Kharkiv, some of the hardest-hit areas of the war.
He said he understands how parents struggle to explain what they cannot explain to their children.
“The fact that we are adults and the war is a real problem for us because our past is destroyed, our house is destroyed, our plans for the future will be destroyed,” said Rozvadovska, who has also been tracking the fate of children for years. caught in the wartorn region of Ukraine.
“For children, depending on their age, [but] if he wants to play, he’ll find a way to play even if the world is on fire.”
The important thing, he said, is to reassure children that there is someone who cares, there is help and there is a future.
“For the children of the younger generation, it is important that they have people who can receive support and the understanding that despite the war, you can live, you can dream and you can plan,” said Rozvadovska.
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