In a long speech addressing the people of Russia on 24 February 2022, Vladimir Putin said:
"I have made my decision to conduct special military operations. The purpose of these is to protect the people who have been subjected to humiliation and genocide at the hands of the Kiev regime for the past eight years. (...) We do not plan to invade Ukrainian territories. We do not want to impose anything by force on anyone."
After the speech, a Russian offensive was launched against Ukraine from three directions which marked the beginning of the largest armed conflict in Europe since the Second World War. We now know that the Russian President planned the 'special military operation' to last for ten days, but the devastating war, causing almost unimaginable human, economic, social and environmental damage, still continues a thousand days later.
The war is not just an unimaginable event taking place far away from our home, but it also became a part of Hungarian reality. This is also the case because soldiers from Transcarpathia - including some of Hungarian nationality - are involved, and Ukraine is a neighbouring country, just a few hours away from Budapest.
After the initial shock and the obligatory wave of condemnations, when the Western intelligence community assessed that there was little chance that Russia would be the first to use nuclear weapons, a situation assessment began. Based on this assessment each country affected by the conflict - the United States, the European Union as a community, other individual countries no matter how geographically close or far away - had to formulate the kind of future they want to live in, who is going to be their ally and who is not. It seems like, however, that a thousand days was not for enough Europe to find a common answer to these questions.
Half the continent, from the Eiffel Tower to the Brandenburg Gate, was covered in blue and yellow, angry Europeans protested in front of countless Russian embassies, profile pictures on social media were covered in blue and yellow frames, yet the war continued. After the war broke out, such symbolic actions expressed solidarity with the Ukrainian people, but they did not affect the course of the war: they did not prevent the Russians from advancing, nor did they give the Ukrainians sufficient means to defend their homeland.
In the past thousand days, the European Union's already fracturing motto of "united in diversity" has lost the unity part over Ukraine, and the Hungarian government had a crucial role to play in this.
Since 24 February 2022, the EU has not really been able to escape all the dilemmas it was facing: should we accept Ukraine as a member of the EU, should we not, we should never, we should take it once peace is achieved, we veto it, we do not veto it, we take a coffee break during the vote, we send weapons, we don't send weapons, we don't send weapons then, we don't send weapons that way, we send troops, we don't send troops, we freeze accounts, we use the interest, we don't use the interest, we put Russia on the sanctions list, we take it off the list, we accept the sanctions package, we get off their gas, we can't get off their gas, we don't want to get off their gas and so on.
At the same time, parts of Ukraine are being bombed to the ground by Russia. The scale of the devastation is unimaginable in many places, proven by tens of thousands of people dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, millions of traumatised relatives and acquaintances. From the Second World War onwards, dozens of conflicts have provided evidence that the weight of such trauma is carried by future generations. Research suggests that the transgenerational effects are not only psychological, but also familial, social, cultural, neurobiological and possibly even genetic. In 15-20 years, today's Ukrainian children will be adults, many of them might be running the country, therefore they will be making important decisions that, like it or not, will affect Europe one way or another.
No matter what Donald Trump comes up with, no matter how fast the twenty-four hours promised by him go by, no matter what kind of ceasefire or peace is achieved, it will not bring reconciliation any time soon. The content of a potential peace and its duration under the kind of external pressure that Trump might put on the cause, is questionable at the very least. Perhaps the most frequently discussed topic in this regard is the surrender of the occupied territories, although we have known since Trianon what a huge trauma it is for a country to lose part of its territory and population. And this is just one aspect of the issue.
Since February 2022, not only half of Hungary, but also half of Europe has become a self-proclaimed security expert. The Hungarian and international press has been reporting with predictable regularity on the wider and narrower geopolitical context of the war against Ukraine, its economic consequences and military movements, even as international attention has waned. However, the war has a softer, sometimes invisible, other times very much visible front, which is aimed at psychologically breaking the Ukrainian people. This strategy includes disinformation dumping against Ukraine, night bombings aimed at breaking nerves and souls, telephone harassment of the families of prisoners of war, and also crimes against vulnerable groups, such as the deportation of civilians.
The most vulnerable and often invisible victims of the war are Ukrainian children, who carry the consequences of their battered childhoods with them for the rest of their lives. They are the victims of the crime that is perhaps the most difficult to comprehend by common sense: tens of thousands among them are removed by force (the Russians call this evacuation), and the aim of the Russians is to completely erase their Ukrainian identity.
Their story rarely makes the headlines, perhaps nowhere outside Ukraine it is an integral part of the public discourse on the war. In Hungary, the subject is even less often discussed. Perhaps it is also difficult to talk about this because there is little knowledge of what happens to the displaced, whether they are adults or children. Hundreds of thousands of them are still living in occupied territories, with whom the Ukrainian authorities have almost no contact, and only a fraction of those who have been displaced have been repatriated. The evidence is mounting, of course, and it is no coincidence that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant against the Russian President's Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova.
Before we go into more detail about how Ukrainian children have become important targets of Russia's war, it is worth looking at the numbers - at least those that are somewhat available. Later, we will also look at the human losses that neither side gives information about. It is also worth starting a bit further 'away from the front' because the war is affecting everyone in Ukraine. Life hasn't stopped anywhere, from Kiev to Transcarpathia restaurants are operating, specialty coffee shops are opening, new businesses are emerging (the Ukrainian IT sector is making a huge leap), children are going to school. But even considering all of the above, you won't find a single person in Ukraine whose circle of acquaintances hasn't been affected by the war.
37 441 000 persons. This was Ukraine's population as of 1 January 2024, but a further decrease is to be expected in the coming years. This number includes Ukrainians living within the internationally recognised 1991 borders, so Crimea, as well as the residents of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions are included. Without them the Ukrainian population would probably be below 27 million. According to a UN forecast published in July, the population could fall to as low as 15.3 million by 2100.
10 000 000 persons. The UN estimates that since Russia first attacked Ukraine in 2014, Ukraine's population has decreased by that much. Even before the invasion in 2022, the birth rate in Ukraine was already one of the lowest in Europe, Ukrainian society was ageing rapidly, and emigration was a major problem. In the last two years, the total fertility rate has fallen to 1, and in the first half of 2024, three times as many people have died as were born. (In comparison, this number is bigger than the entire population of Hungary).
6 752 000 persons. According to UNHCR, this is the number of people who have fled Ukraine since February 2022. Most of them have started new lives in Europe, many in countries bordering Ukraine. (In comparison, this is about the population of Hungary without Budapest).
3 669 000 persons. According to the IOM, this is how many internally displaced people (IDPs) were in Ukraine in August. They were trying to find a place within Ukraine's borders where they could live in relative safety.
The UN estimates that since February 2022, the war has killed around 12 000 civilians and wounded 26 000.
Information on the number of combatants is limited from both the Russian and Ukrainian sides, and there are glaring discrepancies between the data published infrequently by the two sides, raising serious doubts about their reliability.
In February, Volodymyr Zelensky said that 31 000 Ukrainian soldiers had died. Experts say this gross underestimate was intended to reassure society and increase the effectiveness of mobilisation. According to the Wall Street Journal, a Ukrainian source estimated the number of dead soldiers at 80 000 and the number of wounded at 400 000 earlier this year. The Western intelligence community's estimates of Russian losses vary, with some putting the death toll at close to 200 000 and the wounded at around 700 000.
Several former Ukrainian officials have said that one of the reasons why the President refuses to mobilise men aged between 18 and 25, who usually make up the majority of the fighting forces, is that most of them do not have children yet. If men in this age group die or become incapacitated, the demographic outlook will be even more tragic.
The dilemma is dreadful, because the question to be answered is how many people a country can lose before it loses its future. There is no right answer for this question. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have sacrificed their lives to give Ukraine a chance to survive, and it would take the conscription of new generations to ensure that this continues. But Ukraine can only survive if children are born, and for that to happen, some part of the men of conscript age must be kept alive.
The number of prisoners of war is kept a secret by both sides. A year ago, the Ukrainian authorities said there were around 3500 prisoners, in the summer of 2024, Putin said 6500, but the Ukrainians denied this. 97% of Ukrainian prisoners who returned home one way or another reported torture or abuse in captivity, and 68% also reported sexual violence. The picture becomes whole if one looks at the figures from the other side as well: half of the Russian prisoners of war asked reported torture or abuse, mainly in the early stages of their captivity.
According to records of the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior, more than 48 000 people were reported missing in September 2024, including both civilians and soldiers. These people have been swallowed by the war, never to be found dead or alive, leaving their families in despair, waiting in anxiety for eternity.
If you look at pictures from the front, you can quickly understand why the people who come home from the war are different from those who left. Many people have been physically and mentally crippled in the last thousand days, and many more are facing the same fate if the war goes on. Ukrainian society is facing countless challenges, such as accessibility, support and reintegration of people with post-traumatic stress syndrome or the replacement of the role of multi-generational men. These challenges will remain to be solved in the future as well.
The war is directly affecting the lives of not only the hundreds of thousands of people fighting on the front lines and their families, but of everyone. Prolonged power cuts and night air raids are not avoiding even those people who are lucky enough to live hundreds of kilometres away from the front. But the lives of those who have ever lived in the occupied territories even for a short period of time, are completely disrupted. One of the reasons for this is that these people are subjected to a special filtration process by the Russian forces from the outset. This compulsory security filtration is a perverse process, often aggravated by torture and abuse, in which civilians' biometric data are collected, including fingerprints, front and side facial images, body searches, searches for Ukrainian Nazi tattoos, searches of personal belongings and telephones, and questioning about their political views. Those who are waiting for filtration are effectively detained during the process, which can take from a few hours to even a month. (For the sake of clarity, these filtrations are applied to the civilian population. If Ukrainian soldiers are captured by the Russians and they survive, they will be taken prisoners of war.) Filtration is essentially a way for Russians to assess who they consider to be dangerous:
The abuses in the occupied territories are invisible and inaudible to the outside world, as they are largely inaccessible to independent journalists, human rights organisations and the Ukrainian state. Human rights activists say that Moscow's efforts are ultimately aimed at erasing Ukrainian identity through pervasive propaganda, re-education, torture, the imposition of Russian citizenship, and the deportation of children. According to Ukrainians who have fled the Russian occupation, living in the occupied territories is like living in a cage, where travel is restricted and arbitrary violence and detention are parts of everyday life. For those deported to Russia, whether they are adults or children, it is very difficult to get back to Ukraine, as their documents are often immediately taken away and replaced by Russian papers.
All of the groups mentioned above - from internally displaced people to prisoners of war - have been forced by Putin's aggression to live a life that nobody wishes to experience. However, there is one group of people whose suffering is the hardest to comprehend: children.
In order to understand the scale of the phenomenon, it is worth looking at some figures here.
7 000 000 persons. This is approximately how many children were living in Ukraine when the invasion started on 24 February 2022. They experienced varying degrees of physical and psychological violence, loss of family and friends, displacement, escape and disruption of education.
100 000 persons. At the outbreak of the war, this is how many children were being raised without families in state institutions in Ukraine. Most of the children living there are so-called social orphans, they have parents, but their families could not provide for them properly, therefore they were placed in state care. Many of them have some kind of disability. When the war broke out, those who could were sent back to their families, others were placed with guardians or in other institutions, but the Ukrainian state has received harsh criticism for the way it dismantled these institutions after the invasion began.
700 000-750 000 persons. According to Russian officials, this is how many Ukrainian children were reported to have been brought to Russia, as part of a humanitarian evacuation, as Russians call it.
200 000-300 000 persons. According to the Ukrainian Ombudsman for Children's Rights this is the estimated number of Ukrainian children who have been wrongfully abducted by the Russians. The authorities are working with such a broad estimate because they do not know what is happening to those living in the occupied territories.
19 546 persons. According to Ukrainians, this is the number of Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia who could be identified by name.
388 persons. This is the number of identified children who were managed to be returned home by the Ukrainian state, international organisations and NGOs. This is less than two percent of those identified by name.
Crimes against children, be it torture, murder, rape, deportation, may be part of the Russian military strategy, as can be deduced from the telephone conversations of intercepted Russian soldiers, published by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on its Telegram channel: 'They said let's kill everyone, civilians, non-civilians, children.' ‘What are we doing? We are killing civilians, children.’ ‘You are not killing civilians and children, stop it. You are killing fascists.’
Tens of thousands of Ukrainian children have been separated from their families either on the grounds of evacuation or during the screening process mentioned above. They were forcefully transferred to Russian-occupied territories or deported to Russia and Belarus. Some of them were placed with Russian foster and adoptive families and were granted Russian citizenship. Many of the children have been transferred to 'camps' and other facilities where, according to Russian officials, they are 'integrated' and receive a 'patriotic education'.
During the research conducted for the preparation of this article, we spoke to representatives of a number of organisations working to retrieve Ukrainian children who have been abducted. All of them agreed that, no matter whether they are orphans or not, the strategy is the same: the Russians are brainwashing and re-educating the children, aiming at the complete erasure of Ukrainian identity. In school, they are taught Russian, deprived of their own cultural environment, in many places they have to listen to the Russian anthem in the morning, and there are special classes organised for them where they learn that there is no Ukraine, no Ukrainian state, no Ukrainian people, the West is the aggressor, Russia is the victim. The aim is to bring them up as Russians.
As with deportation, re-education can take many forms. These include forced participation in special, pseudo-patriotic, paramilitary-style 'summer' camps, forced participation in Russian paramilitary childrens' and youth organisations, and the participation of Ukrainian children in the Russian education system. But some Ukrainian children have been found on Russian adoption sites as well. Their personal data have been changed by the Russian authorities.
What the Ukrainians call systemic child abduction, the Russians call humanitarian evacuation, experts call hostage-taking, and international lawyers call it at least a war crime, but more likely genocide.
The Ukrainian position, systemic child abduction, perhaps needs no explanation. Russian propaganda claims that Ukraine is abandoning its children, that the deported children were found neglected in orphanages by the liberating Russian forces, while the Ukrainians were bombing the area, this is why they had to be evacuated to Russia, which offers heavenly living conditions for children. When the Russians are not talking about evacuation, they call the removal of children 'rehabilitation', especially for those living near the front line or in need of medical care.
For experts, a hostage situation means that children taken to Russia give the Russians a strong bargaining position in any negotiations, and the leadership is fully aware of this.
The Convention against Genocide explicitly considers the taking of children as a form of genocide, if the intent is to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. If one reads some of Dmitry Medvedev's comments, it becomes clear that the intention to destroy the Ukrainian people is not particularly hidden. The return of forcefully abducted children is being obstructed by the Russians in a variety of ways, because every Ukrainian child who is returned to Russia after being detained is a victim and witness of war crimes. It is no coincidence that one of the points of Zelensky's peace plan is the release of deportees.
It is questionable whether, if it ever happens, the International Criminal Court will consider this practice genocide, and it is even more questionable, if not doubtful, whether there will be any consequences. In a possible future criminal trial, it will be 'easier' to prove war crimes than genocide, there is more and clearer evidence for that, which is why this is the focus of the Hague tribunal.
In order to get the full picture, we should mention that for a variety of reasons, the child protection system in Ukraine was far from flawless before the war, and it would be irresponsible to claim that every single child abducted from Ukraine became held in worse conditions than before. While we cannot and should not disregard forced re-education, in terms of the physical environment (accommodation, care, etc.), some of the children may have gotten into better conditions.
The question of identity, especially in Eastern Ukraine, is another aspect that is full of difficult questions. However, it may help to understand some of the complexity of this otherwise truly horrific phenomenon, and the reason why for some of the displaced civilians the Russian vision, heavily backed up by propaganda, may be an attractive alternative. People living in the occupied territories do not always have a Ukrainian identity. People who consider themselves Ukrainian, Russian, Russian-Ukrainian, Ukrainian with Russian as a mother tongue live side by side. Identity is not a constant label; it is rather forged by external and internal circumstances and events. Since 2022, for example, the Ukrainian identity of people living in Ukraine has strengthened dramatically, but there might be a tendency for the opposite direction in the occupied territories. Of course, identity cannot be confined to rigid legal categories, but it cannot be ignored either.
In all such cases, it is important to consider what the purpose of removing children from their environment is: simply to guarantee their well-being, or are there other purposes behind it, as seen in the case of Russia. It is no coincidence that, alongside Vladimir Putin, the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, has been the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. The deportation of children is not a spontaneous action that takes advantage of current circumstances, but a well-organised process that might be controlled at state level, as is demonstrated by the fact that Maria Lvova-Belova has personally visited the occupied territories on several occasions to monitor the process. She herself has adopted a boy from Mariupol in the presence of media outlets.
The Russian authorities are doing whatever they can to make Ukrainian children the enemies of their own country.
The Russian president had already issued an order on 9 March 2022 to simplify the legal procedure for obtaining guardianship over deported Ukrainian minors. In May, he issued a decree, with the intervention of his children's rights commissioner, to allow orphaned children in the occupied territories to obtain Russian citizenship through a simplified procedure. Under the new directive, orphans and children left without parental care who are citizens of the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic", the "Luhansk People's Republic" or Ukraine will be granted Russian citizenship through a simplified procedure. This serves their own physical and psychological development, according to Russians.
A thousand days after the start of the full-scale invasion, the intensity of the war has not diminished, with North Korea now also having regular forces in the conflict. The US presidential election is now over, Trump’s promise of making peace immediately is being repeated louder and louder, but its implementation is as unpredictable as Trump himself. Meanwhile, there are still tens of thousands of Ukrainian children held in Russia, many of whom have had their names and birth dates changed, which does not suggest that Russia is prepared to agree to their return.
Meanwhile, some of the Ukrainian children already recognize by sound which missile is approaching (we spoke to one such boy as we were writing this article), and they have spent thousands of hours, four to seven months, in shelters instead of playgrounds.
This article was written in the framework of The Eastern Frontier Initiative (TEFI) project. TEFI is a collaboration of independent publishers from Central and Eastern Europe, to foster common thinking and cooperation on European security issues in the region. The project aims to promote knowledge sharing in the European press and contribute to a more resilient European democracy.
Members of the consortium are 444 (Hungary), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), SME (Slovakia), PressOne (Romania), and Bellingcat (The Netherlands).
The TEFI project is co-financed by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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