“We must bring our children home“. Mykola Kuleba‘s usually friendly tone of voice becomes more assertive as he sums up his life’s mission, and even his serene, friendly face is transformed, underlining the solemnity of a task he does not intend to give up.

Since 2014, when he founded it together with a group of other volunteers, Kuleba has been running Save Ukraine, the largest Ukrainian NGO involved in the rescue and support of children and young people abducted by the Russians or evacuated from war zones or occupied areas, but he also served until 2019 as a prosecutor for children’s rights, working with Presidents Poroshenko and Zelensky.

Back then,’ Kuleba says, ‘ we took thousands of children away from war zones, rescuing them from the conflict, because we felt it was right. I have four children and I thought about what I would do if even one of them was under constant bombardment with the risk of dying at any moment. I was also in war zones and there we rescued families and children, got them out of basements, air raid shelters, their homes, often managing to reach them after months, when many of them had lost hope. We acted without thinking too much.

From mass evacuation to stabilisation of the front line

Since then, Save Ukraine has come a long way. The pioneering association of brave volunteers has grown into a vast organisation with offices in many regions of the country, hundreds of employees and volunteers. The headquarters, in Lukyanivka, in the central Shevchenkivskyj district, is teeming with employees busy drawing up administrative and legal paperwork, maintaining contact with the various centres, institutions and international donors. Television crews and journalists from all over the world have been alternating in the meeting room for weeks now, ever since the NGO, through its president, denounced the horror of the ‘online catalogue’ of kidnapped Ukrainian children set up by the Ministry of Education of the self-styled Republic of Luhansk. But the topic, Kuleba goes on to explain, actually seems to be back on the agenda, especially after the August summit in Anchorage, Alaska, when US President Donald Trump handed his Russian counterpart a letter from his wife Melania, specifically concerning Ukrainian children in Russia. ‘In our opinion it was a very important signal,’ he comments, ‘as is the fact that America is still with us. Even if the letter does not explicitly mention kidnapping, since it is still the President’s wife and it is not up to her to take a political initiative in this regard, it still made it clear that it is unacceptable to steal children. We now expect Trump to act accordingly and do everything possible to stop Putin and his aggression’.

What is certain is that Save Ukraine’s activities have, obliquely, accelerated since February 2024, with the start of the large-scale invasion. “I remember,” he says, “that we had to suddenly set up several rescue teams to bring children from boarding schools, orphanages, sometimes dozens of them together. There were days when we rescued more than a thousand children, taking them away from different combat zones. It was a mass evacuation, we had many rescue teams at work, we still had more than 60 emergency transport units, including armoured buses. Today,’ he adds, ‘there is no longer an advance by the Russian army. The line of contact is more stable, but every day hundreds of children have to be brought to safety. Fortunately there are now more organisations involved in rescue, which is why Save Ukraine is focusing more on the most vulnerable, those who are severely traumatised, often orphans whose parents have been killed, children who cannot cope on their own’.

Kuleba prefers not to give details on how these rescues take place, because, he explains, ‘in Russia they consider ours a terrorist organisation that kidnaps children on their territories, even if they are Ukrainian children, who have no intention of becoming Russian’. He assures, however, that he has at his disposal ‘technologies that make it possible to identify children, track them and organise operations, which must, however, be prepared on a case-by-case basis. There are many obstacles, but we have learned how to do it, we have trained operators who know how to talk to the family or the child, establish contact with them, convince them that they will be safe with us. The alternative in the occupied territories for a child is often to be separated from the family, especially if the family opposes Russification, and to be taken to a Russian boarding school or placed with a Russian family. In these three and a half years alone, we have found and cared for 800 children, more than 160 of whom were orphans’.

New generations and the future of Ukraine

Kuleba goes on to say that unfortunately many others have been lost. The Russian representatives in every context have reiterated that they have no intention of returning them and on the contrary, their families are threatened, searched and controlled. In some cases, Russian soldiers simulate the killing of parents in front of their children in order to intimidate them, interrogate them, confiscate their telephones to ensure that they have no contact with anyone in Ukraine, otherwise the children are taken away, placed with families, their surnames are changed and they are given Russian citizenship without consent. “It is clear that the purpose of such brutal actions is twofold: to erase our identity and to stem their terrible demographic crisis at the expense of our people. And they are also succeeding, since 1.6 million Ukrainian children live in the occupied areas right now’.

What they have to face in the regions currently under Russian control they themselves tell, as soon as they get the chance. “If we want to be direct, we can say that they are turning children into soldiers. As early as the age of 12 they are initiated into military training and sometimes sent directly to military academies, where they are prepared for war. At the age of 14-15 they are accustomed to the conditions of a military camp, they are taught to dig trenches, destroy tanks, lay mines, fly drones and even prepare for parachute jumping. At the age of 18, they are then ready for conscription, which is not optional. If you don’t show up, the military comes, handcuffs you and forcibly takes you into the army. We have repatriated such boys, saved from a future in the Russian army’.

Returning the children and young people to Ukraine, however, is only one part of the job and sometimes even the least complicated. “Each one of them,” the NGO leader continues, “arrives with more or less big traumas. These are children who, in some cases, have been locked up at home for years, have not spoken to peers, have not been able to draw, let off steam or play sports. Some have even lost the use of speech. It is hard to believe, but we even struggle to make them understand that there is a way of life that is not under threat or with the constant fear of being punished or abused. A reality in which adults can be trusted and can even think about the future, something these children are unable to do, so busy have they been with having to survive every day in the present. No child should have to live like that”.

This is why Save Ukraine has over time evolved and adapted to these needs, set up a series of centres, enlisted psychologists, psychomotricity experts, pedagogues, speech therapists and developed specific therapies to enable children and young people, but also families of adults on the run, to cope with the traumas of war and life under occupation and enable them to embark on a path of full integration into society. “We see our greatest successes when the young people we help, as soon as they turn 18, come to us and ask us if we can help other young people like them. Because new ones come every day. This means that the younger generations of Ukrainians are also strong, supportive and resilient and have a great thirst for life. Every one of them knows, because they have experienced it first-hand, that you are safer in Ukraine, under Russian bombardment, than in the occupied areas’.

Kuleba recognises that there is still much to be done, especially since thousands of children have been lost. Then there are the borderline cases, such as that of MP Mironov, very close to Vladimir Putin, whose wife arbitrarily took a three-year-old boy from an orphanage in Kherson in 2022, gave him a new surname and kept him with her as if he were a war trophy. ‘This case was discovered thanks to targeted investigations, but little or nothing is known about thousands of other situations like this,’ he says bitterly. Of great use in this respect is the tracking programme set up by Yale University, with which Save Ukraine collaborates on an ongoing basis and which has managed to survive the Trump administration’s cuts in USAID funding. A cut that also directly affected the NGO’s coffers. ‘Currently,’ he points out, ‘our biggest donors are Germany, the Netherlands and some private US donors. Of course any other help is welcome, because the more we can strengthen our activities, the more children we will be able to help’.

It almost goes without saying to ask Kuleba how the international community can help to alleviate this tragedy. “The first step is awareness. It is necessary for everyone to understand that kidnapping children is a crime. And that they understand how important the work Save Ukraine is doing today to save them is. It is crucial that we talk about it, keep the attention high and tell it like it is. For our part, we will continue to tell the truth about what exactly is happening, namely that Putin’s military aggression is killing children, tens of thousands have been abducted, and over one and a half million of them have ended up under occupation. The narrative of the Russian media, according to which it was the children and their families who demanded citizenship, must be countered in every way: we have collected hundreds of testimonies about the threats made by the authorities to anyone who did not agree to become Russian. There are already 41 countries, including Italy, that have joined the Bring Kids Back UA programme, wanted by President Zelensky. But maximum pressure must be put on Russia to provide information on the whereabouts of our children and return them. These are Ukrainian children who deserve to live free in their own country and not to spend their childhood or adolescence in terror, under the oppression of a regime, which is imposed on them by force’.