(NewsNation) — Watching coverage of the war in Ukraine from thousands of miles away, the conflict often looks like impersonal images of bombings, tanks and rubble, but behind the images are thousands of families that have been torn apart, leaving behind a wave of orphaned children.
Katya was 13 when she and her family were forced to flee from the merciless Russian assault in 2022. Through an interpreter, her mother told NewsNation they threw documents and diapers into two plastic bags and ran for their lives.
When the war broke out, Katya’s father, Oleksandr, immediately volunteered to serve. He stayed in Ukraine to defend the now-famous Azovstal Steel Plant when Russians took control, capturing him and thousands of others.
He wouldn’t see his family again for 622 days.
“She said, like, there was no connection with her husband,” the interpreter told NewsNation. “But she said that she was manifesting all the time that Oleksandr is going to be okay.”
Katya’s family are now all together again. They are one of the lucky ones.
There have been a reported 20,000 civilian casualties in Mariupol, Ukraine. Groups like Kidsave are trying to rescue a tsunami of orphaned children.
“Every day, more and more children are being orphaned in Ukraine. There’s no question about that,” Kidsave CEO Randi Thompson said.
Since the start of the invasion, fleets of volunteers have driven to orphanages, rescuing hundreds of abandoned children every day. These are children who aren’t just contending with the challenges of daily sustenance but also the abuse of Russian predators who prey on vulnerable children.
“Those children needed a lot of humanitarian aid and support. But as the kids are becoming orphaned, as they’re being put in shelters, we’re really focused on the fact you can’t wait until the war is over. To get these kids into families if they’re living in an institution. First of all, they’re at higher risk to being taken,” Thompson said. “There’s a lot of trauma, particularly for the children. And they don’t, they don’t control it, they don’t know what’s going on. And so, you know, they’re daily facing this, this war trauma.”
A miracle center high in the mountains of western Ukraine is now serving as a central command center where the influx of children can receive therapy and refuge.
“They are the most vulnerable because even for regular kids, it’s incredibly hard to face all these horrors that war brings every day, but for these children, living in such conditions, they lost their sense of safety completely. And they don’t have anyone to just hold them and tell them that it’s going to be okay,” the director of Kidsave told NewsNation.
The Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region has advanced in recent weeks, with shelling, missiles and airstrikes having reportedly killed at least 30 more civilians.
