Bohdan Levchykov, a 15-year-old teenager, walks by a broken habitation constructing in Balakliia, Oct. 13. AFP-Yonhap
KHARKIV, Ukraine —Along with his shadow of a moustache and baseball cap, Bohdan Levchykov could be your typical teenager anyplace if he did not embody the tragedy of what has occurred to a technology of younger Ukrainians after almost 4 years of battle.
His father Stanislav, a profession soldier, was killed defending the nation’s second metropolis Kharkiv simply weeks after Russia invaded in 2022. On high of all they’ve been by means of, his mom Iryna, 50, was not too long ago recognized with stage-three most cancers of the uterus.
Bohdan now not is aware of anybody his age in his battered hometown of Balakliia, which was occupied by the Russian military from March to September 2022.
It was later retaken by Ukrainian forces, however being solely 70 kilometers (43 miles) from the entrance, it’s nonetheless often shelled.
“My mom and I got here again a number of days after town was liberated, and there have been no kids left, no outlets open, nothing,” he recalled. Solely a fraction of the pre-war inhabitants of 26,000 has trickled again, and most of them are previous.
The skate park and the banks of the Balakliika River the place younger folks used to hang around have been mined by the Russians. They’ve been demined since, “however rumor has it it is nonetheless not protected,” the 15-year-old stated.
All Bohdan’s education is on-line, his days punctuated by air raid alerts.
The 9 flights of stairs all the way down to the basement are greater than his sick mom can handle, in order that they lay a mattress within the small entry to their condominium, the one room with no window. “We have gotten used to getting by on our personal. We’re a decent crew,” Bohdan smiled.
“It is not simply Bohdan. All the youngsters tailored so rapidly,” his mom stated. “This technology — I do not know what to make of them…”
She isn’t the one one to surprise what the battle has finished to Ukraine’s kids.
Bohdan Levchykov, a 15-year-old teenager, poses in his personal room in Balakliia, Oct. 13. AFP-Yonhap
Practically 1,000,000 younger Ukrainians are nonetheless residing in an everlasting lockdown, doing both all or a part of their classes on-line. First there was the pandemic in March 2020, then the invasion — six years of spending most of their time in entrance of the household pc to review and unwind.
This isolation is especially felt within the Kharkiv area bordering Russia, which is the goal of every day assaults.
A number of bars and eating places keep open till the 11 p.m. curfew earlier than night time brings the inevitable Russian drone and missile assaults. Mornings echo with the sound of volunteer groups repairing no matter could be salvaged.
Some 843 academic institutions have been both destroyed or broken within the area — a fifth of the nationwide toll, in line with the Ukrainian authorities’s saveschools.in.ua. web site.
The web investigative web site Bellingcat — with whom AFP journalists in Kyiv and Paris labored on this particular report — has logged greater than 100 video or picture testimonies on social media of Russian strikes on or near academic establishments or youth leisure amenities in and round Kharkiv.
Youngsters in tears have been evacuated when a metropolis centre daycare was hit on Oct. 22. “We will discover your mom straight away,” a rescuer instructed a little bit lady he was finishing up of the smoke and particles, in line with police footage.
Underground faculties
Increasingly more kids are going to underground faculties within the metropolis.
Yevenhelina Tuturiko has been attending one since September, a number of meters under the road with no pure gentle.
“I actually like it,” the lanky 14-year-old stated, “as a result of I can discuss in individual with my classmates once more.”
Paradoxically, Yevenhelina needed to cross Europe to “meet most of my present buddies” in Kharkiv after being invited on a “respite journey” organised by town of Lille in northern France to offer Ukrainian children a style of normality.
Bohdan Levchykov, a 15-year-old teenager, walks by a faculty broken by shelling in Balakliya, Oct. 13. AFP-Yonhap
Kharkiv could have 10 underground faculties open by the top of the 12 months, town corridor stated.
Precedence is given to lessons the place a lot of the kids remained in Kharkiv in the course of the heaviest of the preventing firstly of the invasion, when Russian forces pushed into the suburbs of town. Some 70 % of town’s kids have been evacuated at one time or one other, both overseas or to the west of Ukraine.
The youngsters spend solely half their faculty day within the bunkers to make room for others, ending their lessons on-line.
The varsity AFP visited was constructed to nuclear shelter requirements, with a heavy armoured door. “We’re in all probability one of many most secure shelters in all of Ukraine,” its principal Natalia Teplova stated proudly.
‘Youngsters going mad’
All outside faculty sports activities are banned within the Kharkiv area for worry of Russian strikes. However exterior faculty it is a little bit extra hazy.
“Official competitions are banned, however we’re not state-run, so we make do on our personal,” stated soccer coach and former soldier Oleksandr Andrushchenko as he roared on his younger gamers.
The handful of well-wrapped up dad and mom on the sidelines “perceive that their kids have not developed in any respect (athletically) because the COVID years.
And that it is higher for them to play soccer … than keep glued to their telephones,” he stated.
Inside Kharkiv’s largest swimming pool advanced, educator Ayuna Morozova agrees: “You may’t reside in fixed worry.”
The massive Soviet-era brutalist constructing shut after being hit by two heavy strikes in March 2022, then reopened in Might 2024. Now, when home windows are blown out from the shock waves of close by bombing, they’re simply boarded up with plywood or plastic.
“Water and swimming treatment every thing,” Morozova firmly believes. “First two years of COVID, then 4 years of battle — kids are going mad,” she stated.
The advanced is now additionally house to a water remedy house for amputee troopers.
Along with her flame-red hair and heat method, Ayuna lives as much as her Tatar-origin first identify, which suggests “Nice Bear.” However like nearly everybody AFP met, the injuries of battle floor rapidly. She was buried underneath rubble after an airstrike on a public constructing in 2022. “I nonetheless have nightmares,” she stated. “I keep away from confined areas and lifts. And sure, I did see a psychologist.”
Ukraine lacks the assets to measure the battle’s impression on the younger.
“We do not have sufficient psychologists,” admitted Oksana Zbitneva, head of the federal government’s coordination centre for psychological well being. To attempt to make up for that, “130,000 frontline well being professionals — nurses, pediatricians, household medical doctors — have acquired World Well being Group-certified coaching in psychological well being,” she stated.
Whereas “some international locations have been constructing their (psychological well being) programs for 50 years, we have been the final to get began due to our Soviet legacy,” she added.
The federal government has opened 326 “resilience facilities” for youngsters and oldsters throughout the nation, and “300 extra” needs to be constructed subsequent 12 months, in line with Social Affairs Minister Denys Ulyutyn.
Self-harm
When AFP met psychologist Maryna Dudnyk amid the sunflower fields of Khorosheve, 15 kilometers south of Kharkiv, she had simply led three hours of play workshops with round 50 kids aged six to 11 to assist them categorical their emotions.
As her crew packed away the bulletproof vests — safety protocol calls for they create them — she stated “the battle has had a huge effect on the emotional state of younger folks, all of us reside underneath stress.”
Psychologist Maryna Dudnyk, 50, who works for the Ukrainian nongovernmental group Voices of Youngsters, conducts a psychological aid session for youngsters in Khorosheve, Oct. 14. AFP-Yonhap
In her consulting room, she hears “numerous worry and anxiousness in kids… Youngsters undergo from self-harm, from suicidal ideas.”
Dudnyk, 50, who works for the Ukrainian NGO “Voices of Youngsters,” additionally carries her personal wounds — fleeing from her hometown Mariupol, which was occupied by the Russian military after a brutal siege. “We now not have a house, nothing. Every thing was destroyed.”
Some youngsters have grown a type of emotional armor. Illia Issaiev hated it when his household fled the preventing by crossing over into Russia. The months they spent there earlier than returning made him much more of a Ukrainian nationalist.
The lean 18-year-old with steel-blue eyes claims to be a Kharkiv chief of the ultra-nationalist group Prav Molod (“The Proper Youth”).
We met him as he skilled a gaggle of younger males in dealing with navy drones, his specialty. “Exhausting occasions make folks stronger. Our period is producing robust individuals who will construct a superb nation,” he declared.
It is not so easy for Kostiantyn Kosik, who’s on medicine for his tics, faintness and migraines. “I am continually nervous, on edge. It is due to the battle. It has an enormous impact on my well being,” stated the bearded 18-year-old, who was wearing black.
Kostiantyn is from the Donetsk area, which has been ravaged by preventing since a Russia-backed separatist revolt in 2014. He grew up in Avdiivka, a martyr metropolis now in ruins, which fell underneath Russian management after months of grinding battles.
“I’ve recognized battle because the age of six. At first it was very attention-grabbing for a little bit boy — the tanks, troopers, computerized weapons. After I was sufficiently old to know, it grew to become a lot much less enjoyable,” he stated.
He spent weeks sheltering within the basement of his home because it was rattled by explosions, all of the neighbors gone.
“In a technique it toughened me. However I’d have most well-liked a standard childhood, with buddies, with pleasure,” he stated, his room adorned with a big portray of his hometown.
Kostiantyn Kosik, an 18-year-old displaced individual from Avdiivka in Donetsk area, poses holding a pet in his personal room in Irpin, Oct. 20. AFP-Yonhap
‘They proceed to dream’
Like a lot of the almost 4 million displaced folks inside Ukraine, Kostiantyn’s household is nearly hanging on. They hire a home with no heating in Irpin close to Kyiv. Kostiantyn’s mom spends her days caring for his bedridden stepfather who has had a collection of coronary heart assaults linked to the battle.
Kostiantyn is proud to be finding out worldwide legislation at Irpin College and — regardless of his damaged English — desires to have the ability to work “defending human rights, in Ukraine and elsewhere on the earth.”
Researchers for the WHO who questioned 24,000 younger Ukrainians from 11 to 17 on the finish of 2023 discovered a “deterioration within the psychological well-being” and “important” lower within the happiness they felt.
However there was additionally a “pretty excessive degree of resilience… to wartime adversity.”
A lot so {that a} Unicef examine in August reported that exams have been extra a supply of stress to them than air raid sirens, which “worryingly counsel that battle has grow to be a part of on a regular basis life for a lot of kids.”
“Youngsters have misplaced their dad and mom, their buddies and are sleeping in air raid shelters,” stated Social Affairs Minister Ulyutyn. “And but they proceed to reside, to dream.”
When Bohdan, {the teenager} from Balakliia, isn’t drawing he performs and chats along with his “new buddies”, all on-line. He spends numerous time chatting with a woman known as Lana, with whom “he has many issues in frequent.”
Bohdan additionally has a dream. “I actually need to meet up with Lana. I talked to my mom about it. Possibly our dad and mom can prepare one thing.” However Lana lives in Dnipro, greater than 400 kilometers to the southeast, one other world in wartime Ukraine.
Within the meantime, Balakliia suffered one other strike that killed three folks on November 17,300 meters from Bohdan’s constructing.
