Returning Ukraine’s Stolen Children: Olha Yerokhina on Trauma and Hope

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/12/15

Olha Yerokhina is a Ukrainian professional working on the front lines of child protection and psychological support during Russia’s war against Ukraine. After the full-scale invasion, she joined Save Ukraine in 2022, helping families trace and repatriate children deported to Russian-controlled territories and so-called “summer camps.” She now works with the Voices of Children Foundation, supporting programs that help returned children adapt, rebuild trust, and process trauma through individual therapy, group work, and community activities. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with children and families, she documents patterns of abduction, Russification, and resilience for Ukrainian society and the wider world.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Yerokhina about Russia’s long-running campaign to deport and Russify Ukrainian children, beginning with Crimea and Donbas in 2014 and expanding after the 2022 full-scale invasion. Yerokhina explains how Save Ukraine uncovered the scale of so-called “summer camps” and forced transfers, in contrast to wildly inconsistent Russian statistics. She describes Voices of Children’s trauma-informed adaptation program for returned children, focused on rebuilding trust, community, and education while addressing anxiety, panic, and regression. They discuss art-based healing, staff burnout in wartime, and a culture of stubborn Ukrainian resilience captured in a Maidan-era proverb.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think one crucial question that is not asked enough is: when did the earliest abductions of children happen? What year, what month? 

Olha Yerokhina: Russia’s actions did not begin with the full-scale invasion. They started taking Ukrainian children already after the first invasion in 2014, when they occupied Crimea and parts of Donbas, although it was not done so openly then. When the full-scale invasion began on February 24th, 2022, this practice became systematic and much larger in scale.

In autumn 2022, I worked at the Save Ukraine organization, and we began receiving calls from mothers seeking help. We were able to help them because, at that time, the Armed Forces of Ukraine had liberated some territories in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.

These parents and guardians began calling our organization for assistance. Then we discovered the scale of the problem: how many children had been transferred to these so-called camps under the guise of rest, “summer camps.” But this was not a usual summer camp; many of these facilities were in occupied Crimea or inside Russia and were used for Russification and “re-education” of Ukrainian children.

We also discovered the forcible transfer of orphaned children and children from institutions. A third category was children whose parents had been killed near Mariupol or in other cities where heavy battles were happening. It is still going on.

Since that autumn, we began our work on the repatriation of these children, helping families bring them back from Russian-controlled territories when possible. Save Ukraine has become one of the key organizations involved in returning abducted children to Ukraine. 

In terms of numbers, we are talking about at least tens of thousands of children. Ukrainian authorities have officially confirmed the identities of over 19,000 children who were deported or forcibly transferred to Russia or Belarus, though everyone involved understands that this represents only a portion of the full number.

At the same time, Russian officials themselves have reported much higher figures. In 2023, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, publicly stated that more than 700,000 Ukrainian children had come to Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion, including those taken from occupied territories and those who arrived with their parents. Other Russian sources mentioned around 744,000 children. Later, some of these figures disappeared from official websites, which raises the obvious question: why remove them if there is nothing to hide?

I am sure that researchers can still find these documents and archived statements. Meanwhile, we are now in the fourth year of the full-scale war, and we still do not know the complete scale of the deportations. We do not have access to many of the occupied territories, and there have been no recent major liberations that would allow us to document what has happened there fully.

Who knows how many children were transferred, even this year, in 2025, or how many parents were killed. I have personally spoken to people from Mariupol who witnessed children who had lost their parents being taken first to occupied Donetsk and then to different cities in Russia. For them, this is not an abstract statistic; it is something they saw with their own eyes.

Ukraine cannot have a proper number because we do not have access to the occupied territories, and the Russians do not provide actual numbers. State media gives whatever narrative they want. Give me one second. At some point after the first applications, Ukraine began working with third countries to mediate—Qatar, for instance. So the Russians provide some lists of children, but of course, they include only small numbers. And how can we verify them? How can we check?

I had a conversation with a journalist in Russia in 2023. She told me she knew for sure that in one particular institution in Russia, there were Ukrainian children. But when she went there, they did not allow her even into the yard, only letting her see the fence. So, how can we in Ukraine get real numbers and know how many children are actually there? It is almost impossible until Russia provides information—or until a third country obtains it properly. That is my opinion.

Jacobsen: On August 17th, 2025, an article entitled “Beyond Genocide: Ethnicity and Identitycide—Russia’s Strategic Imperial Demographic Policy of Russifying Ukrainian Children” by Ayşegül Aydıngün, Valeriy Morkva, and İsmail Aydıngün, noted a range of reports similar to what you’re saying, from verified figures to broader estimates, ranging between 19,500 and nearly 750,000. So the 19,500—those are the verified cases, as a bare minimum. Regardless, we are talking about at least approximately 20,000 or more children who have been abducted and subjected to this Russification project.

The critical question is less about statistics—although they help create a general picture—and more about the children who come out. They come to you or others for rehabilitation. What is the process for a child whose parents may have been killed, who has been orphaned, possibly given a different name, displaced, and then returned to their culture of origin? In a way, it is a second displacement. Psychologically and informationally, everything is scrambled for these kids. How do they cope? What do you do?

Yerokhina: We are at the point now where we have created a program specifically for the adaptation of returned children. Our psychologists at the Voices of Children Foundation, where I work now, provide initial support when a child returns. The first meeting happens with the child-protection authorities and the psychologist together.

The psychologist thinks through everything, even how they are dressed and how to address the child. The child may want to be called by a different name, officially or unofficially. There is no physical contact. The first meeting is entirely about building trust, because the main harm done to these children is that they have lost confidence in adults. They lost confidence in the world.

When they return, they are closed. They do not understand whether they can trust us. We may take them somewhere else. What we say may not be true. So the first thing we do is build contact. We rebuild trust.

Then this happens individually, since some children stay in Kyiv and others go to other regions. We have centers in eight areas of Ukraine where psychologists work with them, either in individual sessions or group sessions. We also work with communities—schools, libraries—but this is done very gently, without pressure. We try to build a community, a safe place for the child. When they return to their country of origin, the goal is for them to feel as secure as possible, at least as secure as they can think in Ukraine now.

Jacobsen: There was a now-famous destroyed school. You may have seen the video with the rubble—it’s a long school building, and a girl is playing a violin. Have you seen this?

Yerokhina: Yes.

Jacobsen: So we were there, doing a shoot, taking photos, documenting the site. When we were there, it felt like the perfect characterization of the war, both externally and in people’s minds. The school was destroyed by ground fire. It was still literally falling apart as we stood there—pieces of tile and brick dropping off. The roof was gone.

Near it was a track. People walked or ran around it. There was a playground, a basketball court, and a tennis court. The school was completely obliterated. I have never seen a school destroyed to that degree. Two meters away, the playground, basketball court, and track were perfectly intact. I did not see a single bullet mark anywhere on them.

As we were there, two mothers were pushing infants in strollers around the track. While that was happening, Remus (Cernea) was filming a TikTok. I was taking photos. Then the air alarm started. None of us flinched. No one cared. It was the most perfect representation: everything is normal, and everything is not normal. A track and field, a tennis court, a playground, mothers with infants, journalists working, and yet it is all scrambled.

When I talk to people with trauma, not only war trauma, it resembles how their minds seem to function. Everything is normal, but all the categories have been mashed together. That school was the perfect external metaphor for war. So I assume a lot of the children coming to you arrive in that psychological state—not just lacking trust, but having their entire framework of trust destroyed.

Yerokhina: Yes. But there is something else, something significant. One girl who returned from Russia said to me, “Why do people keep asking me about my story and my life there? I have told my story so many times.” I asked her if that was a problem. She said, “No, it’s not a problem, but I want to live. I want to live my life. I want to live normally. I want to forget this experience. I came back, and I want to be a normal Ukrainian teenager. So I don’t want to tell my story anymore. I want to forget it.”

She is doing well now—she is studying at a university. Eventually, her friends and people around her stopped asking, “How did you live there? What were the Russians doing? What was the Russian school like?” Children are children. They want to move on, under any circumstances.

Jacobsen: Which is a sign of psychological resilience—the ability to pursue new experiences while integrating the past. What about the disorders that appear? Depression, mild anxiety, and panic disorders. What kinds of more acute cases are coming to you? What kinds of more acute psychological cases are you seeing? Depression, anxiety, panic disorders, and so on.

Yerokhina: I can name a few. Anxiety is widespread. Problems with sleep. Panic attacks. If we are talking about more minor children, they can develop physical disorders. They are old enough to use the toilet normally, but they may suddenly lose that ability.

Jacobsen: Bedwetting or incontinence, colloquially speaking.

Yerokhina: Yes. It depends on the age and on how difficult their experience was. Every case is individual. I can tell you about one boy—he is probably 13 now. He came to our center. He learned some techniques, and now he calms himself using those techniques: breathing exercises, grounding practices, and nonverbal sensory methods that our psychologists taught him. He uses these in daily life now.

If we are talking about teenagers—15, 16, 17 years old—they do not show much at first because of their age. What they need most is socialization. They need to come to our center and feel a sense of community, a place where they can talk to peers and be involved in activities with peers. Eventually, they begin to talk about their problems.

Jacobsen: Another factor is educational loss. When children are abducted and placed into another culture or different educational system—and then brought back after one, two, three, four years or more—they lose much schooling. How do these educational gaps show up?

Yerokhina: I have spoken to many teenagers who have had these gaps because of abduction or forcible transfer. It is tough. For example, you may be 17 now, but your knowledge of the Ukrainian curriculum stopped two years ago.

We have special programs—not our foundation, but the state of Ukraine—that allow them to learn this material in a shortened period, online. You can go to school or college, but you must fill the gap with online tests, with the help of teachers. These programs exist now.

Also, tutors help. Many boys and girls I have spoken to revised the entire curriculum in one year—for example, two or three years of missed education completed in a single year with help from tutors and teachers. Some of them later entered universities, institutes, and colleges successfully.

Jacobsen: So it is an accelerated program to catch up.

Yerokhina: Yes. But of course, it is still tricky. Abducted children have these educational gaps, but children in Ukraine also have them, especially in frontline cities. In Kharkiv, for instance, they study online all the time.

Some girls from Zaporizhzhia told me that the city is under constant shelling, so many teachers have moved or left. One girl said it is more convenient to study online, but she joined organizations and youth groups to meet people, to see peers, and to make friends.

So the returned children who were in occupied territories or in Russia also face these difficulties in Ukraine. That is why, in our centers, we offer activities together. That is why we work with schools and communities to highlight the need for socialization—especially for teenagers.

Unfortunately, the war is still going on, so we need to find solutions, the balance required to give an education to all children and to integrate returned children in a way that creates conditions for more straightforward adaptation. The rest of the children in Ukraine need the same things.

Jacobsen: It is common. If you look at the Beijing Declaration or any of its updates—basically any primary gender-equality document—when it comes to war, they often mention “rape as a weapon of war” or sexual assault as part of the violence. When I interviewed Commissioner Vrinda Grover, the lawyer from New Delhi who serves on the UN Commission on Ukraine, she noted in their recent November 3–6 based report that prisoners and POWs, men and women, experienced a significant number of sexual assaults while in captivity. For the children who are abducted and come back, is there a pattern to that as well?

Yerokhina: I have heard about physical violence, not rape. For example, a 15-year-old girl told me that when she was in one of the camps in Crimea, a man was acting as a kind of “caregiver.” He supervised everything to make sure it was “in order.”

One day, she wore a T-shirt with a tiny Ukrainian flag. He noticed it and said, “Give me this T-shirt.” She said, “No, I’m wearing it.” He forced her to take it off. He tore the T-shirt into pieces. She cried, and he threatened her.

Then he invited her to another room to “talk” about it. But she did not go. She was brave. She cried through the whole incident, but she did not obey. I asked her, “Did you have something else under your T-shirt?” And she said, “Yes, thank God I had an additional layer.”

These are open-textbook interviews; you can search for anything you need. She told me it was a tank top under the large T-shirt. But of course, it was a significant trauma for her—to be forced to take off her clothes in front of this man. She had known him for some time in the camp, but still, he was an adult male in a position of power. It was not very comforting.

Another girl told me that another caregiver hit her because she did not obey an order—something about staying on the territory or inside a building. A boy told me something else. I cannot say whether it is a verified fact, but he told me that caregivers had sex with some teenage girls in these camps. Whether the girls wanted it or not, he did not know—those were his words. But thank God, none of the girls who spoke to me described rape directly.

Most teenagers talked about physical and psychological violence, and about being forced to learn military skills. You do not even need to abduct children from occupied territories to control them—they create an atmosphere of obedience.

If you are a parent living under occupation, you have no choice. You will send your children to a Russian school. You will send them to these militarized youth movements. Otherwise, you cannot live there. And now I know what is happening in some occupied territories. For example, in one family, the child lives with his grandmother, and the mother is in the Ukrainian-controlled area. The war separated them.

Russian authorities pursue this vulnerable grandmother. I know this case personally. It is true. They told her, “You are not the official guardian. This is not your child. We will take him from you.” That is the threat of abduction—again. One organization in Ukraine helped this grandmother leave the occupied territories with the child, thank God. But what about other families?

Jacobsen: In World War II, many stories only came to light more than half a century later. It could be similar in this case, too. Unfortunately, in my own family, it came out only in 2016 that relatives had sheltered a Jewish couple to protect them from the Nazis. That revelation came in the 21st century, not the 20th. These things surface slowly. History repeats itself—sort of.

Yerokhina: Yes, sort of.

Jacobsen: What kind of humanitarian support is the most helpful for the work you do? And what is nice to have, but not essential?

Yerokhina: After we address the family’s and the child’s basic needs, the most important thing is creating a safe environment. Children need safe places where they can communicate. That is everything.

We provide activities for their development. We do art therapy. We have courses—two that are especially popular among teenagers. One is a film-creation course. The second is a creative writing course through art. Through art, teenagers gain stability, healing, and confidence. They feel more certain about their future. They feel the ground under their feet. That is the power of art.

Yerokhina: The core need is for a child to know that they have a future, if that makes sense. Many teenagers come to us and say, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t see the meaning of life anymore. I don’t know if tomorrow will come.” They are depressed. They are insecure. 

When they take part in these courses, they learn that the fear of death—well, we are not wizards. The fear of death in Ukraine is present for everyone. But they gain the feeling that they can do something about their lives, that they have a future. They begin to form goals. And this is important.

We say that we must work with teenagers and children in Ukraine now, not after the war, not after some future “ending” of the war. Now. Because they have problems now. They have psychological wounds, trauma, and the lived experience of war now. After some sessions, after some courses, they begin to say, “Yes, now I can look into my future. I know what I want to do.”

Jacobsen: I am going to reverse the frame. Questions shape frames, and the frame here is not about the kids. What about preventing staff members—and yourself—from burning out? The kind of secondary trauma, emotional transference, andthe general stress of the war context. How do you prevent being overwhelmed? You, your colleagues, your organization—everyone who takes in these children, runs the missions, provides humanitarian and educational work for traumatized kids. How do you avoid burnout?

Yerokhina: We have trips. We have retreats to the Carpathian Mountains. We gather as a team in restaurants. We talk to each other. We try to have a nice time at performances, in theatres in Kyiv, for example. It’s interesting—I wrote an article about teachers in Ukraine, but the situation is the same. We, as a team at our foundation, and teachers in their sphere, face similar pressures.

I asked different teachers how they cope, how they prevent burnout. I received different answers. Some go to training. Some go into the forest and feel nature. In our foundation, we also do various things—mountain trips, dinners, exhibitions, and cultural events. There are still many extraordinary events happening in Kyiv and in other cities. So yes, it is ordinary things. We try to continue living our everyday lives.

Jacobsen: What are your favourite Ukrainian quotes or aphorisms—pieces of wisdom that, for you, characterize the work that you do? Something like “all that glitters is not gold,” but Ukrainian.

Yerokhina: There is one phrase—something like, “Fire doesn’t burn those who are hardened (by it).” I do not know how to translate it perfectly into English. It became famous during the Maidan Revolution in 2014. It is about resilience, about the nonstop resistance of the Ukrainian people. 

Jacobsen: For years, Ukrainians have surprised everyone, especially the Russians. 

Yerokhina: We did not think we could endure years and years of resistance.

Jacobsen: True. Olga, nice to meet you. I appreciate your expertise. 

Yerokhina: Thank you for your interest. Bye-bye.

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