Guest Column: Ukraine’s children and the war

By Stephen Norris, Guest Columnist

Monday, Feb. 24 marked the three-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Most Ukrainians describe the events of February 2022 using these terms, for they know that Russia’s current war started in 2014 after the illegal annexation of Crimea.

I spent the day thinking a lot about my friends and colleagues in Ukraine, wishing there was more I could do to help them. The shameful vote at the UN on Monday, Feb. 24, when the United States voted against a Ukrainian resolution to condemn Russian aggression and hold Russia accountable for the innumerable, well-documented war crimes committed on Ukrainian soil, did not help my mood.

I also thought a lot about the innocent victims of Russia’s war, particularly the children of Ukraine. 

My position as Director of the Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies has afforded me the opportunity to interact with a lot of Ukrainians over the years. During the last  three years we have welcomed journalists, writers, photographers, historians and other scholars from Ukraine to campus. One consistent point they have all made is the need to listen more to Ukrainian voices tell their own stories. 

We could also pay more attention to the plight of Ukrainian children and how their lives have been affected by the ongoing war. The Havighurst Center, working with colleagues at King Library, purchased the streaming rights to Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary “The Invasion” and made it available to the Miami community starting Feb. 24. Loznitsa’s film uses footage from 30 camera crews throughout Ukraine who filmed the wartime life around them from March 2022 to January 2024. 

It’s an extraordinary film full of memorable scenes. One segment follows a school in an unnamed Ukrainian village. Grade-school children arrive by bus, bicycle or foot to go to their daily lessons. An air raid siren sounds and teachers calmly lead the students to a basement bomb shelter. It’s clear that air raid interruptions are routine. One young boy exclaims “we’re going to be able to skip our lessons!” 

He does not get his wish. After the students sit down in the cold shelter, the students return to geography. When the siren sounds the all-clear, everyone heads home.

After I watched the film, I received an email from Mykola Mandziuk, the head of the Community Foundation in Oxford’s sister city of Dubno. Oxford Mayor Bill Snavely had put me in touch with Mykola, and I had written to him to ask about life after three years of full scale war. Mykola twice mentioned that he felt the most for Dubno’s children, who had awoken that day to another air raid siren and who had school cancelled as a result. Mykola lamented the fact that for Dubno’s children, their “childhood moments will be associated with the war” and with interruptions like these. 

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Dubno has welcomed approximately 7,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) fleeing from war zones in eastern Ukraine. Many came from Kherson, which was heavily bombed, occupied and then flooded by Russian forces. One of these IDPs, Lyubov Slyusar, became the leader of Dubno’s Plast Organization, Ukraine’s equivalent to Scouting USA. Boys and girls from Dubno, including IDPs, go camping, participate in other activities, and learn how to be “self-educated, self-organized, active citizens.”

In his role as head of Dubno’s Community Foundation, Mandziuk helped the IDPs and their integration into the Plast movement. Loznitsa’s film, the Plast scouts and Mandziuk’s answers to my questions all captured the resilience of Ukrainians and their desire for freedom. “Despite the war, life in the city continues, children study, organizations and enterprises work,” Mykola commented.

On Feb. 24, I also read several articles in the Kyiv Independent, the best English-language newspaper published in Ukraine. One reported on the return of eight children from Russian captivity. They are among the 1227 returned after being kidnapped by Russian forces. According to the Ukrainian government’s Children of War site, at least 19,546 Ukrainian children were deported or forcibly displaced to Russia. 

A second story featured letters written to St. Nicholas by Ukrainian children who had lost parents in the war. The children wanted peace. They wanted St. Nick to help other kids. And they wanted to remember their parents. 

We would do well to remember the resilience of ordinary Ukrainians, to listen to them speak about their experiences, and to remember the fate of Ukraine’s children.

Stephen Norris is Walter Havighurst Professor of History and Director of the Havighurst Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at Miami University.