A Generation Orphaned by War: Ukrainian Children Grow Up Amid Loss and Recovery

Kyiv, Ukraine — They say time helps to heal, but months have passed, and Alina Skytsko still struggles to talk about Nov. 2, 2024 — the day her mother was killed in the Russian shelling of Kherson.

There were nine explosions that night. Alina, her two cousins and her mother were hiding in a bathroom in Alina’s grandmother’s house when, in a flash, everything was covered in dirt and dust. Wounded in both legs, the 16-year-old shielded her mother, not realizing she had already died.

Nearly four years after Russia’s invasion, which reached its anniversary in February, thousands of children in Ukraine have been orphaned, many wounded, displaced or thrust into adult roles as caregivers and witnesses. As the fighting drags on, their lives unfold across hospitals, courtrooms and temporary homes, revealing the long-term human cost of the conflict far from the front lines.

This reporting draws on interviews with orphaned Ukrainian children in Kyiv, Odesa and Uzhhorod, many of whom witnessed their mothers being killed by Russian forces. From Kherson to Kramatorsk to Mariupol, their lives trace the war’s long aftershocks — a generation forced to recover, testify and raise siblings long before adulthood.

Russian forces have also been accused of forcibly removing Ukrainian children from occupied territories and transferring them to Russia or Russia-controlled areas. Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine’s Humanitarian Research Lab say more than 19,000 Ukrainian children have been deported, with just over 1,200 returned, and warn the true number may be higher. The lab has documented thousands of children placed in institutions, foster care or adoptive families, often cut off from Ukrainian language and identity, as relatives search for them across borders and through courts.

Alina is one of about 2,000 Ukrainian children orphaned by the war, according to SOS Children’s Villages, a Vienna-based nongovernmental nonprofit that supports children without parental care.

Alina’s recovery and rehabilitation remain long and difficult. Books and online school classes no longer interest her. Both of her legs are skin and bones from the injuries. Another surgery is scheduled soon at Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, Okhmatdyt. On New Year’s Eve, she wished the war would end, that she would walk again and maybe return to her war-torn hometown on the Black Sea.

We met Alina on her hospital ward in September. The night before the interview, she said she woke to the howling air-raid sirens. Her father helped her into a wheelchair, and they took the elevator to the basement. Hospital staff treat air alerts seriously, after the Russian missile strike in July 2024 destroyed several Okhmatdyt buildings, killing two people and injuring 16.

Alina said her wounds were painful. A nerve was damaged in her right leg, and shrapnel tore a piece of muscle from it. Her shoulder was still sore and might also require surgery. A metal plate had been removed from her right arm. She had dyed her hair purple.

“That is life now. It’s hard to think of the future,” Alina said, shaking her head. She is relearning to walk on her thin, wounded legs, one step at a time. She wrote “loser” on her cast, then corrected “s” to “v.”

Questions about the future annoy her. There was only one thing that clearly made her happy, she said: music. “I am a music lover. Music helps. I prefer rap — the heavier the better,” she told us with a modest smile.

In November, hospital volunteer Natalia Zabolotna helped arrange Alina’s monthlong rehabilitation at the Koziavkin center in Truskavets, where Alina took her first steps. Wearing a hat with two furry ears, she likes to sit outside in her wheelchair, scrolling through social media or enjoying the rare sunshine.

“Alina hopes she will be able to walk better after the next surgery,” Zabolotna said in an interview. “We offered Alina psychological aid, but she firmly rejected it. For now, Alina sees the world mostly out of the hospital window.”

Sixteen-year-old Kateryna Iorhu knows what Alina is going through. She was wounded in a Russian bombing and witnessed her mother’s death on April 8, 2022, when a ballistic missile with a cluster munition warhead exploded over a train station in Kramatorsk, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

Kateryna, who goes by Katia, and her sister, Yulia, keep a picture of their smiling mother holding a plastic cup of tea, taken minutes before the blast as they waited for an evacuation train. The explosion killed and wounded dozens. Katia tried to crawl to her mother across ground covered with victims’ bodies, but could not — she was badly wounded.

For weeks, Katia would not talk to anybody.

“I totally understand Alina not wanting to talk to a psychologist about her loss, her wounds,” she said. “But she should know that at some point it helps to make friends with the right psychologist, who she’d be able to watch animations with or discuss books, or play and chat about everything.”

Specialists said the details of such tragedies may fade over time. “We try not to bother the orphans until they are willing to speak with us,” said Valentyna Lutsenko, a senior doctor at Okhmatdyt.

Lutsenko met Katia and Yulia in 2022, months after their mother was killed. Katia did not speak then. She moved through the hospital in a wheelchair or sat in her ward making bracelets of beads for doctors and nurses.

We later met with the sisters in Kyiv’s Botanical Garden with their aunt and grandmother. With help from volunteers and private donors, Katia and Yulia, 11, live in a rented three-room apartment. Katia attends a design college in Kyiv, where she studies composition and painting and she ranks at the top of her class. Painting calms her, she said.

But fear returns at night. “We don’t have a bomb shelter near our house, so we were just sitting on the floor in the corridor all night,” Katia said.

Since losing their mother, Yulia has spent hours online playing Roblox. To get Yulia away from screens, the family enrolled her in aikido classes. “Right now, it’s too slippery to go out — the roads are covered in ice — and we also have bad nights of shelling,” Katia said in an interview earlier this month.

Programs and safe spaces outside the home, such as those offered by the Chabad Orphanage in Odesa, provide support for children coping with trauma. When we visited the Mishpacha Children’s Home, a Chabad-run institution that provides care for Jewish orphans in late September, Chaya Wolff, Mishpacha’s director, was playing with children on the playground, then mediated a dispute among teenagers.

Children from across Ukraine come to the orphanage to learn Hebrew, observe Shabbat customs and live as siblings. Two children, ages 2 and 4, chased each other on the playground. According to Wolff, their father had nearly killed their mother after returning from the front.

Their sister Sarah left this month to attend school in Israel. “Hopefully, the war in Israel is over soon,” Sarah, 16, said. “My parents abandoned me when I was 5. I feel for the children who lost their parents in this war in Ukraine. One day, I hope to become a teacher here and help Ukrainian children learn.”

For some Ukrainian children, the war has meant not only the loss of parents, but also being uprooted and taken far from home by Russian forces. Ilya Matviyenko was 10 when his mother, Natalia, was mortally wounded during shelling in Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine on March 20, 2022.

“We were walking across our courtyard when a missile blew up nearby. We were both badly wounded,” Ilya told us during a September interview in Uzhhorod in Western Ukraine, the city he now calls home. “I believe that many more people should know what happened to us.”

His mother pulled him into a neighbor’s house. There was no hospital or doctor nearby. Ilya held his mother, listening to her hoarse breathing. She died in his arms and was buried in the yard the next morning.

Ilya suffered wounds to his hip and legs. Russian forces took him across the front line to Russia-occupied Donetsk, where he spent nearly a month alone in a hospital. His grandmother, Olena, traveled through four countries to bring Ilya to Kyiv, carrying him out because he was too weak to walk.

Weeks later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Ilya at Okhmatdyt and gave him an iPad. His case drew attention as one of the first Ukrainian children to be returned from occupied territory after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Ilya now calls his new role “diplomatic.” He and his grandmother have traveled across Europe and to the United States. The war, his loss and his wounds have made him seem older than his years. Now 13, Ilya has new friends in Uzhhorod. They play in the courtyard, and Ilya likes football.

“My friend Eldar already has a mustache — me too. I’m 5 feet tall, already taller than my grandmother,” he said proudly.

Ilya was among the orphans who testified at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, telling the world about atrocities in Ukraine. He told us he hoped to meet with President Donald Trump later this year. He sees his role as an “ambassador for Ukrainian children” wounded or orphaned in the war.

“It’s a major mission, but I’m not getting carried away,” he said. “I’m just doing what needs to be done. I think it’s important to share this.”

Elsewhere in Uzhhorod, near the banks of the Tysa River, there is a popular cafe called Lypa. We met there with Viacheslav Yalov, 21, and his three siblings in September.

Viacheslav’smother died from injuries sustained during shelling in the town of Verkhniotoretske in the Donetsk region in March 2022. She was 37. Viacheslav, who was 18 at the time, was left to care for his four younger brothers and sisters. He managed to evacuate himself and the children as the town came under attack.

His struggle did not end there. Viacheslav went through several court proceedings to win custody of his siblings. “Because the most important thing for me was to keep my family together. I’m doing this for our mother. She always did everything and anything for us,” he said.

After fleeing the Donetsk region, the family moved through Lviv, Kyiv and Dnipro, and finally Uzhhorod. For now, it is the safest place in the country, and Viacheslav works to protect his siblings’ sense of peace.

His brother, Danil, is now over 18 and studies in Kyiv. Viacheslav cares for the younger three: sisters Nicole and Olivia and brother Timur.

Nicole loves dancing, especially jazz and funk, but said she wants to become a lawyer. Olivia plays the piano and has learned The Pink Panther and several Michael Jackson songs. Viacheslav plans to enroll Timur in robotics classes.

Before the invasion, Viacheslav studied medicine and completed two of three years of training to become a paramedic. He now works several jobs to support his family and volunteers with a charity, but his focus remains on his siblings. They have lunch together once a week. On Sundays, they share what they didn’t have time to talk about during the week.

“They are all I have, and they are my motivation to keep going,” he said, gesturing to his siblings as they ate pastries and fruit tea. “Times are tough for everyone right now. There’s no time to sit around and complain.”

“I want the best not only for myself, but also for others,” he continued. “Ukraine will need to be rebuilt. The country will need young people who want to do something.”

Maria Kostenko is a freelance journalist who has worked with CNN since the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, researching and reporting on the war. She and the CNN Worldwide Ukraine team received the Dupont Columbia Award for broadcast, documentary and online journalism. She is an International Women’s Media Foundation grantee this year.

Anna Nemtsova is The Daily Beast’s Eastern Europe correspondent and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Her Ukraine reporting has also appeared in The Washington Post, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, USA Today and Politico. She is a recipient of the Persephone Miel Fellowship and the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Courage in Journalism Award, and is an IWMF grantee this year.