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Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. Ukraine’s President Zelensky made a strongly worded appeal for more help from his European allies in Davos, as a U.S.-triggered crisis over Greenland diverts Europe’s attention away from Ukraine. Russian attacks on the power grid have left thousands in Kyiv and beyond without heat amid an especially brutal winter. The UN’s human rights chief called the targeting of civilian energy infrastructure cruel and a breach of the rules of war.
As Russia’s attack on Ukraine reaches the four-year mark next month, we turn to look at its impact on Ukraine’s children. Journalist Anna Nemtsova has interviewed kids and teens across Ukraine orphaned by the war and joins me now. Welcome to Forum, Anna.
Anna Nemtsova: Thank you.
Mina Kim: In many cases, the children you interviewed actually witnessed their parents’ deaths, as was the case with Alina Sotosco. Can you tell us what happened to her in November of 2024?
Anna Nemtsova: Alina was together with her mother, visiting her grandmother in Kherson, a southern city on the Black Sea. They were hiding from the bombing that day. There were nine strikes on Kherson, and they were hiding in the bathroom.
During the explosion, there was a group of people hiding in the bathroom, and a missile hit nearby, near their building. They were all wounded with shrapnel. Alina saw that her mother was still alive, and she covered her mother with her own body during the second explosion, without realizing that her mother was already dead.
Alina was wounded in her legs and in her arms with shrapnel, and she was undergoing multiple surgeries after she lost her mother.
Mina Kim: How was she doing when you saw her? How is she today?
Anna Nemtsova: She was a quiet teenage girl. She was fourteen when her mother was killed, and she turned sixteen when we met with her. She was shy. She didn’t want to talk about that awful day in November 2024.
She had dyed her hair purple, and she told us about the heavy music she was listening to. She liked music. Otherwise, she couldn’t walk, and right now she’s expecting one more surgery on her legs. She’s dreaming of walking again. And one day, maybe, she’s dreaming of visiting her hometown on the Black Sea.
Mina Kim: I understand that she’s resisted talking to a psychologist or having psychological help. What have you learned about why?
Anna Nemtsova: Oh, well, there was no clear answer. She was not ready. When we interviewed psychologists and rehabilitologists, doctors at the Okhmatdyt Hospital, they said that children need time before they’re ready to talk about what happened to them or to their parents — about their loss.
So psychologists and doctors are there for the kids as soon as they’re ready. Before that, they try to entertain them. They invite musicians to the hospital. They take kids out on field trips, play with them, educate them.
With Alina, it was difficult because she was very much inside, you know, with her own pain. She’s an introvert, she said. She wrote “loser” on her cast and then corrected one letter, crossed it out, and wrote “lover.” So she had a kind of dark sense of humor. She said, yes, I like music — but the heavier, the better.
Mina Kim: What have the experts or doctors you’ve spoken to said about the recovery and rehabilitation that children like Alina face?
Anna Nemtsova: A long time — for Alina, it’s a long road. She was severely wounded, and she’s sixteen. You know, it’s hard to go through surgeries without your mom.
We also interviewed Yulia and Katia. Katia was only thirteen when she witnessed her mother’s death in the bombing of Kramatorsk in 2022. She was in a wheelchair for a while, and she couldn’t really talk for weeks.
Now, you know, three or four years later, these kids feel much better. Time heals, they say. They still don’t like to talk about that tragic day, but Katia is studying design at a college in Kyiv, and Yulia spends days playing Roblox and going to school online.
She likes Roblox, and she asked us to pass along a thank you to the Roblox developers in California. She said, you know, without Roblox, I wouldn’t have had friends. On the days of violence, when she could not go to school, she played her favorite games.
Mina Kim: Yeah. So Katia and Yulia, as you say, are sisters who were orphaned by their mother’s death in 2022, a couple years before Alina. But it sounds like their experiences are representative of other experiences among Ukraine’s children. How many Ukrainian kids have been orphaned by this war? What are the estimates?
Anna Nemtsova: There is a group containing children orphaned by the war called SOS Children’s Villages. They are talking about about 2,000 children — about 2,000 children who’ve lost one or two parents.
We try to report stories to figure out how children do after they lose their parents, how they move on. All the children we interviewed were talented. Some like to paint. Some like to play music.
We interviewed an amazing teenager who adopted, more or less, four of his brothers and sisters when their mother was killed in the Donetsk region. He moved them to Uzhhorod. Being eighteen years old, he was all of a sudden responsible for four more children.
They are all talented. They play music. They sing. They all think of their mother still, whom they adore. She was a very, very good mother and an angel, he says — our character. He works two or three jobs to be able to provide for his siblings, and they’re all very well behaved — a good family, a good, solid family.
Mina Kim: We’re talking with Anna Nemtsova, Eastern Europe correspondent for The Daily Beast and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, about her new piece for KQED, which is up today on our website: “A Generation Orphaned by War: Ukrainian Children Grow Up Amid Loss and Recovery.”
We’re talking about the impact of Russia’s war on Ukraine’s children. Anna has spoken to some of the thousands of kids who’ve been orphaned or wounded or displaced or thrust, as she just described, into adult roles as caregivers and witnesses.
Listeners, what are your thoughts and questions for Anna on the effects of losing a parent to violence and war? Perhaps you’re a survivor of war yourself or have a connection to Ukraine. How are you reflecting on nearly four years of Russia’s war on Ukraine and its impact? How do you think it will end?
You can email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, BlueSky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786 — 866-733-6786.
You were talking about a young man who ended up taking on the adult role of caring for his siblings. Is this Vyacheslav Yalov? And if it is, could you tell us his story in a little bit more detail?
Anna Nemtsova: Vyacheslav just turned eighteen. A few days before, he witnessed his mother’s death. He cried every time he talked about his mother, but he made the decision to become a foster parent for four of his brothers and sisters.
He evacuated his siblings to Uzhhorod in western Ukraine and established his life there, working as an aide for a local politician and thinking of becoming a politician himself. He has different jobs.
When my colleagues — Ukrainian journalists I teamed up with to report on this project — first talked with him on the phone, they were in tears. They said he was so pure and genuine. What was unbelievable to them was how young he was to become a parent to so many children — four children.
That tragedy made him grow up quicker. He had to move on. He had to take care of his siblings, and that was his biggest responsibility in life.
Mina Kim: Yeah. And I understand he initially experienced two court denials in his bid to become the parent of his siblings, but he kept fighting and eventually got them.
There’s one detail in your piece that really struck me. You wrote that after his siblings go to bed, he allows himself to feel the full weight of his grief — that he doesn’t want them to see.
Anna Nemtsova: Well, he’s a fatherly figure now — a strong, adult father, he’s supposed to be. But there are videos of him online crying when he talks about his mom. I’m sure his siblings have seen those videos.
He’s a very light, warm, genuine young man, but he misses his mom greatly still, so many years later. He’s trying to move on, but missing her every single day.
Mina Kim: Yeah. The quote is, “I put the children to bed, go out onto the balcony, and sob with tears that I can’t describe to you. Sometimes I don’t understand what to do next, but I keep trying.”
We’re talking about the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on children and young adults with Anna Nemtsova. We’ll be hearing from you, our listeners, about your thoughts on the effect of war on kids, and maybe you know it personally.
We’ll also be discussing the current state of the situation in Ukraine. Stay with us. You’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.
