With his shade of mustache and baseball cap, Bohdan Levchikov would have been your typical teenager anywhere, if he didn’t embody the tragedy that has happened to a generation of young Ukrainians nearly 20 years later. four years of war,
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His father Stanislav, a career soldier, was killed defending Kharkiv, the country’s second city, just weeks after Russia’s invasion in 2022. To top it all, his 50-year-old mother Irina was recently diagnosed with stage-three uterine cancer.
Bohdan no longer knows anyone his age in his hometown of Balaklia, which was captured by Russian forces From March to September 2022. It was later retaken by Ukrainian forces, but being only 70 kilometers (43 mi) from the front, it is still regularly shelled.
“My mother and I came back a few days after the city was liberated, and there were no children left, no shops were open, nothing,” he recalled. Only a fraction of the pre-war population of 26,000 has returned, and most of them are old.
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The skate park and the banks of the Balaklika River where young people hung out were mined by the Russians. They have since been phased out, “but rumor has it it’s still not safe,” said the 15-year-old.
All of Bohdan’s schooling takes place online, his days interrupted by air raid alerts. Climbing the nine stairs to the basement is more than his ailing mother can handle, so he laid out a mattress in the small entryway of his apartment, the only room without a window. Bohdan said with a smile, “We have got used to doing things on our own. We are a strong team.”
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His mother said, “It’s not just Bohdan. All the kids adapted so quickly.” “This generation – I don’t know what to make of them…”
She’s not the only one who wonders what effect the war has had on Ukraine’s children.
Nearly one million young Ukrainians are still living in perpetual lockdown, doing all or part of their lessons online. First came the pandemic in March 2020, then the onslaught – six years of spending most of our time in front of the family computer to study and relax.
This isolation is especially felt in the Kharkiv region bordering Russia, which becomes the target of attacks on a daily basis.
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Some bars and restaurants stay open until 11 pm, before the inevitable Russian drone and missile strikes at night. Mornings echo with the sound of volunteer teams repairing whatever can be salvaged.
According to the Ukrainian government’s saveschools.in.ua, about 843 educational establishments in the region have been either destroyed or damaged – a fifth of the national death toll. site.
The online investigative site Bellingcat – with which AFP journalists in Kiev and Paris worked on this special report – has logged more than 100 video or photo evidence on social media of Russian attacks on educational institutions or youth leisure facilities in and around Kharkiv.
Crying children were evacuated when a daycare in the city center was attacked on 22 October. “We’re going to find your mother immediately,” one rescuer told a little girl he was pulling out of the smoke and debris, according to police footage.
underground school
More and more children are going to underground schools in the city. Yevhenlina Tuturiko has been participating in an event several meters down the road with no natural light since September.
“I really like it,” said the skinny 14-year-old, “because I can talk to my classmates in person again.”
Ironically, Yevhenlina had to cross Europe to “meet most of her current friends” in Kharkiv after being invited on a “relief trip” organized by the city of Lille in northern France to give Ukrainian children a taste of normality.
City Hall said 10 underground schools will open in Kharkiv by the end of the year.
Priority is given to classrooms where most of the children remained in Kharkiv during the heaviest fighting at the beginning of the invasion, when Russian troops entered the city’s suburbs. About 70 percent of the city’s children were taken at one time or another either abroad or to the west of Ukraine.
Children spend half their school day in bunkers to make space for others and complete their classes online.
The school AFP visited was built according to nuclear shelter standards with heavily armored doors. “We are probably one of the safest shelters in the whole of Ukraine,” its principal Natalia Teplova said proudly.
‘The kids are going crazy’
All outdoor school sports are banned in the Kharkiv region due to fear of Russian attacks. But outside of school it’s a little more blurry.
“Official competitions are banned, but we are not run by the state, so we do it on our own,” football coach and former soldier Oleksandr Andruschenko thundered at his young players.
“A handful of well-prepared parents understand that their kids haven’t developed (athletically) at all since the COVID years. And it’s better for them to play football rather than be glued to their phones,” he said.
Inside Kharkiv’s largest swimming pool complex, teacher Ayuna Morozova agrees: “You can’t live in constant fear.”
The massive Soviet-era Brutalist building closed after two massive attacks in March 2022, then reopened in May 2024. Now when windows are blown out by the shock waves of nearby bombing, they are simply covered with plywood or plastic.
Morozova is a firm believer, “Water and swimming heal everything.” “First two years of Covid, then four years of war – the kids are going crazy,” he said. The complex is now also home to a hydrotherapy site for disabled soldiers.
With her red hair and warm demeanor, Aiuna retains her Tatar-origin first name, which means “great bear”. But like almost everyone AFP met, the wounds of war quickly surface. She was buried under debris after an airstrike on a public building in 2022. “I still have nightmares,” he said. “I avoid confined spaces and elevators. And yes, I visited a psychologist.”
Ukraine lacks the resources to measure the impact of the war on youth.
“We don’t have enough psychologists,” admitted Oksana Zabitneva, head of the government’s coordination center for mental health. To try to compensate for this, “130,000 frontline health professionals – nurses, pediatricians, family doctors – have received World Health Organization-certified training in mental health,” he said.
“Although some countries have been building their (mental health) systems for 50 years, we were the last country to start because of our Soviet legacy,” he said.
According to Social Affairs Minister Denis Ulutin, the government has opened 326 “resilience centres” for children and parents across the country, and “300 more” are to be created next year.
– self harm –
When AFP met psychologist Maryna Dudnik among the sunflower fields of Khoroshev, 15 kilometers south of Kharkiv, she was leading three-hour play workshops with about 50 children aged six to 11 to help them express their emotions.
As his team packed bulletproof vests – they come with them in accordance with safety protocols – he said, “The war has had a huge impact on the emotional state of young people, we all live under stress.”
In her consulting room, she hears that “there is a lot of fear and anxiety among children…teenagers are suffering from suicidal thoughts, from self-harm.”
Dudnyk, 50, who works for the Ukrainian NGO “Voice of Children”, also suffered wounds as she fled her hometown of Mariupol, which was captured by Russian forces after a brutal siege. “Now we have no home, nothing. Everything was destroyed.”
Some teenagers have developed a kind of emotional armor. Ilya Issaev hated it when his family fled the fighting to Russia. The months he spent there before returning made him an even more Ukrainian nationalist.
The lanky 18-year-old man with steely-blue eyes claims to be the Kharkiv leader of the ultra-nationalist group Prav Molod (“The Right Youth”).
We met him when he trained a group of youth to operate military drones, which was his expertise. He declared, “Tough times make people stronger. Our era is creating strong people who will build a good country.”
It’s not so easy for Kostiant Kosik, who is taking medication for his tics, fainting and migraines. “I’m constantly nervous, stressed. It’s because of the war. It has a huge impact on my health,” said the bearded 18-year-old boy, dressed in black.
Kostyantin is from the Donetsk region, which has been ravaged by fighting since a Russia-backed separatist insurgency in 2014. He grew up in Avdiivka, a martyred city now in ruins and falling under Russian control after months of fierce fighting.
He said, “I have known war since the age of six. At first it was very interesting to a little boy – tanks, soldiers, automatic weapons. When I was old enough to understand, it became much less fun.”
He took refuge for several weeks in the basement of his house as it was shaken by the explosions, with all the neighbors gone.
“In a way it toughened me up. But I would have liked a normal childhood, with friends, with happiness,” he said, adding that his room was decorated with a large painting of his hometown.
– ‘They continue to dream’ –
Like most of Ukraine’s approximately 4 million displaced people, Kostyantyn’s family is in crisis. They rent a house without heating in Irpin, near Kiev. Kostiantyn’s mother spends her days caring for her bedridden stepfather, who has suffered multiple heart attacks due to the conflict.
Kostyantyn is proud to have studied international law at Irpin University and – despite his broken English – he wants to be able to work to “protect human rights in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world”.
WHO researchers questioned 24,000 young Ukrainians aged 11 to 17 in late 2023 and found a “deterioration in psychological health” and a “significant” decrease in the happiness they felt.
But there was also “a very high degree of resilience to wartime adverse conditions”.
So much so that a UNICEF study in August reported that exams were a greater source of stress for them than air raid sirens, which “worryingly suggests that war has become part of everyday life for many children.”
“Children have lost their parents, their friends and are sleeping in air-raid shelters,” said Social Affairs Minister Ulutin. “And yet they continue to live, to dream.”
When Balaklia teenager Bohdan is not painting he plays and chats online with his “new friends”. He spends a lot of time chatting with a girl named Lana, with whom “he has many things in common”.
Bohdan also has a dream. “I really want to meet Lana. I talked to my mom about it. Maybe our parents can arrange something.” But Lana lives more than 400 kilometers to the south-east, in Dnipro, another world of wartime Ukraine.
Meanwhile, on 17 November, another attack on Balaklia, 300 meters from Bohdan’s building, killed three people.
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