For millions of Ukrainians growing up in wartime, the sound of air-raid sirens and explosions, the musty damp of basement bomb shelters and fears for the safety of family and friends will be indelible memories of childhood.
In areas controlled by Russia, the terrors of war are compounded by those of occupation – the erasure of Ukrainian identity, the danger of arbitrary detention and punishment by a hostile power and, increasingly, the threat of conscription into Russia’s army and deployment to the front to fight against Ukraine.
Some children and young adults manage to escape and reach the safety of Kyiv-controlled territory, but it is a dangerous undertaking for them and for people who help them along the way in occupied Ukraine, Russia and neighbouring Belarus.
“I walked across the border into Ukraine from Belarus,” says Bohdan, a 20-year-old, who fled a Russian-held city in Zaporizhzhia region last month. “I was met by our soldiers and they shook my hand. They asked me how I was doing and they joked with me. They treated me like a human being. It was a great moment.”
Dima, who is 21, also reached government-controlled Ukraine in September after escaping his home city in an occupied part of Donetsk region. His relief was deepened by a last-gasp brush with Belarusian police officers who could have sent him back to face the Russian authorities. But to his amazement, they let him continue to the frontier.
“I finally breathed more easily,” Dima says of his arrival in Ukraine. “I knew that whatever was ahead of me couldn’t be worse than what I’d been through. The worst was behind me.”
The plight of Ukrainians enduring occupation is a reminder of what it would really mean to give Vladimir Putin swathes of the war-torn country in a peace deal. US president Donald Trump and his allies are again courting Russia – lifting sanctions on its diesel exports, discussing potential business deals, blaming Kyiv for prolonging the conflict and throttling arms supplies and satellite internet access for its military.
Beginning with its annexation of Crimea in 2014, and spreading and intensifying with its full-scale invasion of 2022, the Kremlin has sought to cement its hold over a swathe of southern and eastern Ukraine by imposing Russian identity and citizenship on its residents.
All aspects of life have been Russified, and refusal to integrate in the occupiers’ system and accept a Russian passport and other documents makes it all but impossible to find work, go to school, get healthcare or receive a pension.
The campaign is relentless in schools, where the Ukrainian language and curriculum have been replaced by a programme that lionises Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders, justifies his war as a heroic defence against a hostile and decadent West and portrays the occupation as a glorious regathering of the Kremlin’s lands.
So-called patriotic and military education plays an ever-bigger role in children’s lives inside and outside the classroom. Russian soldiers and veterans give talks to pupils of all ages, demonstrate weapons and lecture on the duty of all good citizens to defend – and expand – the motherland.
All this is intended not only to inspire loyalty to Putin’s regime but prepare young people in occupied Ukraine to replenish the ranks of his army, as an all-out invasion that has killed and injured more than a million Russian soldiers grinds towards its sixth year.
Bohdan says he reluctantly took a Russian identity document – known as an internal passport – simply to access basic services after his home city was seized in early 2022, and then renewed it when he turned 20, as is mandatory under Russian law.
“The clerk asked me if I was on the military register. Then she smiled and wrote out a call-up paper, and handed it to me with the new passport,” says Bohdan.
“But I didn’t go to the conscription office, because I knew that people were being taken straight from there to the Russian army. Then, after a couple of months, I got a second draft notice. I was working as a boxing trainer, and I was told that either I register for the Russian military or I won’t be allowed to work.”
Dima trained to be an electrician, and was also obliged to register as eligible for call-up by the Russian army if he wanted to work. In May 2025 he was summoned to serve a year of military service in the national guard at a base near the Russian city of Rostov.
“What happened to me there I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” he says, recalling how officers imposed harsh physical punishment for tiny mistakes or supposed infractions.
“They basically treated us like cattle, and were particularly rough on people from what they called the ‘new territories’” – a reference to occupied Ukraine.
“At the start they tried to completely erase my identity as a person. They tried to make us think like soldiers. We shouldn’t think, they said – a soldier should be obedient, not smart.
“There was also a military-political part of our training, when they would try to grind all this [propaganda] nonsense into us. It was basically like brainwashing.”
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After serving a year as a conscript, Dima returned in May to his hometown, which has been transformed by Russia’s brutal attack and subsequent occupation.
“It’s only possible to speak Ukrainian if no police or soldiers hear you. It’s practically impossible to follow Ukrainian news or social media – only through Telegram channels, as long as you’re not caught doing it. The propaganda there is strong, very strong,” he says.
Barely any signs of the city’s Ukrainian identity remain, while scars of battle from 2022 are everywhere.
“There is still lots of damage, and many destroyed and burned-out buildings,” says Dima, who decided this summer to try and leave and make his way to free Ukraine.
“There were rumours that mass mobilisation [by the Russian military] was coming. Having just gone through military service, I could well have been mobilised quickly, while I still remembered how to load a rifle.”
Both Bohdan and Dima asked for their surnames not to be published and for their faces to be hidden in photographs, because their parents are still living under occupation and could face harassment or retribution from the Russian authorities.
“In July I told my parents I wanted to leave, and I tried to persuade them to leave too. At first they didn’t take me seriously and then, as the time approached, they started to panic,” says Dima. “My father even became aggressive – they really didn’t want me to go. So I had to deceive them a little – I told them I was going to Rostov for about four days. Two days later I was in Minsk.”
His journey through Russia to the capital of Belarus and then to the Ukrainian border was co-ordinated by Save Ukraine, a charity he contacted through friends who had earlier fled to Europe. Since 2022 the Kyiv-based group has rescued some 1,900 children and young adults from occupied areas of the country.
As Dima was sitting in Minsk on a train that would take him a step closer to Ukraine, Belarusian police officers approached and asked for his documents. His parents had reported him missing.
The autocratic regime of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko is probably the closest ally of Putin’s Russia, so Dima thought that his escape bid had failed almost at the last, and he would be sent back to face the music in occupied Donetsk.
He began gathering up his things – but then the policemen told him not to bother, because this would only take a minute. They quickly recorded a video of him saying he was not missing, was travelling of his own free will and had committed no crime, and then they let him go.
Dima’s parents have seen the video and know he is now safely in Kyiv, but still oppose his decision to leave their Russian-controlled city.
By contrast, Bohdan says he feels full support from his strongly pro-Ukrainian family, and remembers how his late grandmother made fun of occupying soldiers.
“My parents told me to leave, because there was no future for me there,” he says. “As soon as I crossed the border from Belarus, I sent messages telling them that I was in Ukrainian-controlled territory. Everyone congratulated me – my parents, my sister and my friends.”
It was Bohdan’s sister who put him in touch with Save Ukraine. She was in Kyiv when the full-scale war began, and they recently met for the first time in five years. “We were both so happy,” he says.
Kyiv officials said last November that Russia had drafted more than 46,000 Ukrainians into its military, and that 16 per cent of prisoners of war held by Ukraine were its own citizens.
Analysts say Russia must recruit some 30,000 soldiers a month to replace those killed and wounded in Ukraine, but Putin wants to avoid another wave of mobilisation after about 400,000 people fled the country to escape the last such sweep in 2022.
The Kremlin has so far managed to replenish the army’s ranks through a combination of financial incentives and coercion, but the former are becoming harder to maintain as military spending spirals and the budget deficit grows. It is forecast to hit 3.2 per cent of gross domestic product this year, double the previous target.
The upshot is likely to be increased pressure on Russia’s regions and occupied territory to send more men to the front, as the Kremlin continues to try to insulate the capital and other big cities from the effects of its war.
“More and more young men are now trying to escape being taken to fight in the Russian military,” says Artur Zayonts of Save Ukraine. “We see Russia pushing very hard to take young men from occupied territory into the army and make them fight against Ukraine.
“Militarisation is very strong there, and Russia puts lots of money into brainwashing our boys and girls. Russia has a demographic problem, and wants more men for its army, and wants our girls in occupied territory to have more babies.”
Ukraine has identified more than 20,000 children who have been transferred to Russia in recent years, and an estimated 1.6 million minors are living in the 20 per cent of the country that is currently occupied.
This year 41 member states of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe asked a team of independent experts to investigate Russia’s treatment of Ukrainian children.
The mission found “indoctrination operates across every level of the school system in the occupied territories” and that “militarisation extends beyond the classroom through state-sponsored military-patriotic youth organisations and re-education camps”.
This group of international experts concluded that the “the best interests of the child were disregarded in every dimension of Russia’s policy” and that “forcible transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children and the practices of systemic indoctrination and militarisation may amount to crimes against humanity”.
Moscow did not co-operate with the mission, and claims to be acting in the best interests of all young people living in areas of Ukraine that it now claims as its own.
Russia also rejects the authority of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which in 2023 issued arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children’s rights, over their alleged role in the mass abduction of Ukrainian children.
“If we send a request to Moscow to find out how many Ukrainian children are in occupied territory or in Russia, they will say zero – because they think all these children are now Russian children,” says Myroslava Kharchenko, Save Ukraine’s chief lawyer, as she plucks a sheet of paper from her desk and waves it in the air. “Just like this, they treat them like an object that they have taken, so now it is Russian.”
Save Ukraine meticulously plans each exit route for people trying to leave occupied territory, and it is a dangerous undertaking not only for those escaping but for the people who help them along the way.
“In two cases our drivers in Belarus spent some time in prison,” Kharchenko says. And there was the case of a volunteer in occupied territory who was involved in an attempt to rescue orphans ... and he and his wife were held captive for three days. He was beaten and tortured. But in all cases, we managed to get these people out.”
Save Ukraine’s centre in a Kyiv suburb can accommodate about 80 people. It is much safer than occupied territory, but air-raid sirens and the boom of explosions and air-defence fire is common now in the city. Three people were killed and four hurt this month when a Russian drone hit rush-hour traffic a short distance from the centre.
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Many Save Ukraine staff also escaped from occupation, and Kharchenko says they know better than anyone what the children need when they arrive.
“We give them a place where they feel safe. In occupied territory, you know that nobody could protect you. No police officer, and not your own mother or father. You know that, any time, Russian soldiers could burst into your home and interrogate you.
“So psychological support is really important. They have been traumatised from being in occupied territory, and it is another trauma when they decide to leave home. They are leaving close relatives behind ... and it is difficult for them to understand that they may never come back to this place.”
“One young girl we rescued thought Ukraine no longer existed. She thought Russia had won and Ukraine was in total ruins – that everywhere was Russia. This is because of Russian propaganda – she hadn’t been able to get information from anywhere else.
“We’re not fighting for territory. We are fighting for those who live there. Territory is nothing without its people,” she adds. “The world has to know what’s going on. And people living under occupation need to know that we are fighting for them.”
Source: The Irish Times · Daniel McLaughlin
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