As the children of the Kremlin elite have been spotted enjoying warmer weather in posts on social media this week, the number of Ukrainian children killed in Russia’s war surpassed six dozen, with many more wounded, traumatized, or orphaned just two weeks into Putin’s bloody “special operation.”
And that’s to say nothing of all those Ukrainian children forced to come to terms—while hiding out in bomb shelters—with the fact that their peers are dying all around them.
The Daily Beast spoke with several Ukrainian mothers who have struggled to explain the impossible to their young children: why Vladimir Putin’s forces keep trying to hurt them.
ADVERTISEMENT
“The kids heard explosions with their own ears, they saw tanks with their own eyes, tanks in the same parks where they used to play … ‘Mama, what is that?’ they asked. There’s no point trying to hide it from them. So we told them this is war,” said Vika, a mother of two who fled Kyiv after the Russian invasion and spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity. She is now hiding out in a village outside the city along with her two children, aged 9 and 6, and those of her goddaughter, Yulia, who is also sheltering at a local farm.
The Daily Beast is not disclosing the name of the village, at the request of families hiding out there who cited security concerns. Both Vika and Yulia said that while many Russian children are largely oblivious to what’s happening in Ukraine thanks to Kremlin propaganda, it has become impossible to shield kids in Ukraine from the grim reality on the ground.
“The kids know there are other children dying,” said Yulia, whose sons are 5 and 12 years old, respectively. “Ksenia [her 6-year-old goddaughter] sees everything that is happening. She asked her mother, if she becomes an angel, will her mother fly away with her too? Of course, she is asking that because so many kids are dying.”
As of Friday, Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s ombudsman for human rights, said a total of 78 children have been confirmed dead as a result of Russia’s war. The latest victims include a 6-year-old girl who authorities say died “alone” and “frightened” underneath the rubble of a home in Mariupol. Two babies were also killed in the Zhytomyr region late Tuesday when Russian air strikes hit several residential buildings, Denisova said in a statement on Telegram.
At least 100 more kids have been injured, and many more orphaned, as the Kremlin has continued to defy reality and claim civilians are not being targeted. In a jarring display of the parallel reality the Kremlin has sought to create, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed Putin’s “special operation” was “not directed against civilians,” even as an Amnesty International investigation found that 47 civilians killed in an attack on Chernihiv last week were simply lining up for food at the time of the attack, and there was no “legitimate military target” anywhere near the area.
“They are just shooting at everyone... It’s like that’s how they entertain themselves, shooting at civilians and children,” Yulia said, adding that one of her relatives had witnessed a car carrying children get shot up by Russian troops during a desperate evacuation attempt in Irpin. Local authorities said eight people had died in the attack on Sunday, including two children.
“My youngest son, he’s 5, he just wants to play with his friends so badly,” Yulia said. But instead he is living in a state of constant terror, she explained, always bracing for cues to rush to the shelter of the basement.
“The children are already so used to the sound of explosions, that yesterday there was a blast, and they got themselves dressed and rushed into the basement on their own,” she went on, adding that shelling by Russian forces usually intensifies at night. “I never thought I’d be so terrified of the night time.”
Explaining this new reality of near-constant bombing has become a surreal new requirement for many Ukrainian mothers, said Katerina Laskari, who owns a Ukrainian television production studio called Space productions and fled Kyiv with her family a few days ago.
“It is the hardest thing I think now for all Ukrainian mothers,” she told The Daily Beast. “I had to tell him because he heard everything, he heard bombs, he heard sirens,” she said of her 3-year-old son.
Katerina’s son thinks that the family is on a “quest,” and she helps him stay happy by telling him what is happening in “game form,” as she calls it. “I had to explain to him that bad guys, bad boys, they came here but now we have to save our country.”
Along with her son, her husband, both her 60-year-old parents, her brother, his pregnant wife, and their 2-year-old daughter, Katerina traveled more than 700 kilometers to a small village in the west. The family made it in time for Katerina’s sister-in-law to safely give birth at a hospital on Wednesday.
She said she plans to stay put for now, and is prepared to explain everything to her son “when he will be 6, 7 years old … and I will tell him from our Ukrainian point of view of course.”
Vika, the mother hiding out at a farm near Kyiv, said she expects there will be “hatred towards Russians for centuries to come” because of Putin’s war. For her, the tragedy is twofold, she explained, because with a Russian mother and Ukrainian father, her family has been divided as a result of Kremlin propaganda.
“I spoke to my sister, who is in Krasnodar, and she told me, ‘You yourselves are to blame. You didn’t want to do it the nice way, we warned you.’ I said, ‘If they kill me and my children and destroy our home, will you say it was our own fault?’”
Even though Vika understands why many Russians seem to buy into the Kremlin’s narrative of the war, she finds it difficult to suppress her own rage when it comes to her children falling victim to Putin’s aggression.
“[My 6-year-old daughter] woke up in the middle of the night after we came here. She shook me awake and said, “Mamochka, will they kill us today?’ For those words alone, I am prepared to take up arms against anyone who has a passport with a [double-headed] eagle,” Vika said, referring to the symbol embossed on Russian passports.
“It’s really terrifying, because the kids react to any sound at all. Anything. … Even if it is just a cabinet door opening, the kids will shudder. … I am sure this will end only when they close the airspace, because if they don’t, they will just keep bombing us,” she told The Daily Beast.
That sentiment was echoed by another mother, Yaroslava, who was working as a lawyer and taking care of her 6-year-old son outside Kyiv until Russia invaded.
Once war came to the capital, she was forced into an unthinkable situation, one that saw her send her young son to the relative safety of western Ukraine while she herself stayed behind to help local soldiers.
“He was crying, he was asking to stay, but we had to tell him no, that he’s safer there,” she said of her son Demyan. “He used to sleep with me, he used to get a lot of hugs … but now he is without me,” she added, noting that he was being taken care of by friends and had “a golden ticket if we compare him with other children in Ukraine.”
“Everyone now in Ukraine has to make difficult decisions, to stay here and support the military, to protect the city, or leave the place. I had a feeling that I needed to stay as long as I could to protect the town,” she explained.
Both she and her friends taking care of Demyan have sought to shield him from the effects of the war as much as possible.
Yaroslava speaks with her son at least once a day, she said, but cannot speak with him for very long “because I think if I speak longer, I will cry, and he will feel these emotions… we don’t tell him that there are deaths … we are not talking to him about bombs or telling him our buildings are being destroyed.”
In the first few days of Russia’s invasion, though, Demyan caught wind that something was wrong when he was told to take shelter in the bathroom of the family’s home.
“The first question was why are they attacking us, and what do they want? Then he asked why we don’t have a good fence to protect us from Russia, like, how is it possible to have such a neighbor and not have a good fence?”
“He used to like to play war and be a soldier,” Yaroslava said, but now “he said he will never play it again, because he couldn’t imagine it would be so scary.”
