The treatment of war orphans in wartime Ukraine

War distorts every social institution, and none more painfully than the systems that protect children. Ukraine entered the full-scale invasion with a patchwork of child-protection arrangements already mid-reform: an ambitious shift away from Soviet-era boarding schools towards kinship and foster care, uneven funding across regions, and a civil service learning to work with non-governmental partners. The war did not pause that transition; it tore through it. Understanding how Ukraine treats the children who have lost parents to death, disappearance, separation or forced deportation requires looking beyond the word orphan itself. In Ukrainian law and practice the larger category is “children deprived of parental care”, which includes those whose parents are missing, detained, gravely ill, conscripted, or trapped in occupied areas. This wider definition is not a euphemism; it is the practical frame within which social workers, courts and communities now operate.

The first principle shaping responses since February 2022 has been proximity to family. Wherever possible, authorities prioritise keeping a child within his or her own kin network: a grandparent, an aunt, an older sibling legally appointed as guardian. This aligns with international guidance but also cultural reality. Ukrainian family life is often extended and inter-generational; in villages and small towns, grandmothers are the bedrock of care. The strengths of this model are obvious: continuity of love and identity, the preservation of language and local customs, and the avoidance of institutional harms that are well documented across the region. Yet kinship care under bombardment comes with heavy burdens. A seventy-year-old pensioner may suddenly find herself guardian to three school-age children while her own sons are at the front and her daughter is displaced abroad. She must manage pensions, stipends and food queues; navigate legal guardianship paperwork; argue with schools over transfer credits; and coax traumatised children to sleep during nightly air-raid alarms. The State provides allowances and expedited guardianship decisions, but inflation, displacement and the administrative complexity of war stretch these supports thin.

Where kinship cannot be arranged the preferred alternative is foster care, which Ukraine has been scaling for several years. Wartime has both expanded and strained this system. On the one hand, civic solidarity has produced acts of quiet heroism: families taking in unrelated children with scarcely a second thought, churches and local associations organising volunteer foster networks, and municipalities recruiting and training carers at speed. On the other hand, the training of new foster parents is difficult to maintain when social workers are displaced, case files are lost in destroyed offices, and psychologists are needed in front-line hospitals. Matching is also more complex than in peacetime. Sibling groups should stay together; children with disabilities need accessible housing and specialised care; teenagers, often the last to be chosen, require patient adults who can hold the line through grief and anger. Good foster care is a craft; wartime short-cuts, however well-intentioned, can invite later breakdowns.

Institutional care still exists and, in emergencies, sometimes expands. At the height of evacuations, boarding schools and children’s homes served as transit and reception centres. For a child newly bereaved, an orderly dormitory may be safer than chaos, and a nurse on night shift better than none. The danger is inertia. History shows that emergency placements ossify into years; paperwork lags; and the child’s world shrinks to corridors and schedules. Ukraine’s reformers know this, and a significant part of wartime child protection has been precisely the hard work of moving children out of institutions into families even as missiles fall. That work is not glamorous: revisiting case plans, tracing relatives who fled to Poland or Germany, securing consent orders from courts that sit by video-link, and arranging travel across a continent for a child to live with a trusted aunt. Each successful reunification is a small act of resistance to the logic of war.

Adoption raises particularly acute questions. Under martial law domestic adoption is possible but tightly regulated; international adoption is largely suspended, both as a matter of sovereignty and as a safeguard against trafficking. The moral intuition here is sound. In the fog of war, certainty about a child’s legal status is often unattainable: a parent listed as missing today may be identified tomorrow; documents may be forged; an aunt in occupied territory may resurface months later. Permanent adoption abroad, however loving the prospective family, risks severing ties that are not yet known. The preference has therefore been to maintain provisional arrangements—guardianship and foster care—until facts settle. This frustrates would-be adopters and leaves children in limbo, but it is the least harmful course consistent with the child’s right to identity and national belonging.

The most contested chapter concerns children taken from occupied territories to the Russian Federation or moved within occupied areas without consent. For those children who later return, the State treats them as victims of unlawful displacement and prioritises reintegration, legal redress and psychological care. For those whose whereabouts remain uncertain, case officers collect fragments of evidence—birth certificates, school records, DNA samples, witness accounts—to preserve the child’s legal identity and support future claims. The politics are obvious, but the child’s needs are practical: a path to reunification if living relatives can be traced; clarity over citizenship and travel documents; and specialised trauma support. In this domain Ukraine’s treatment is not only domestic policy but also an appeal to international law: that children are not the spoils of war.

Across every form of care, three cross-cutting needs dominate: documentation, mental health and continuity of education. Documentation is the hinge upon which all else turns. A child may have lost everything except a first name. Rebuilding identity requires cooperation between registries, courts and local authorities, and increasingly the use of digital tools. Ukraine’s government platform Diia—a widely used mobile application for identity documents and public services—has been adapted to speed certain child-protection procedures. Digitalisation prevents some abuses and reduces delay, but it cannot function where connectivity is poor or officials lack training. Paper still matters: certified copies, notarised consents, and signed court orders carried in plastic sleeves across borders.

The mental health toll is profound and variegated. Some children are withdrawn and hyper-vigilant; others are explosive; many alternate. Grief is complicated when a funeral is impossible or a parent is missing in action with no closure. Caregivers, often traumatised themselves, need structured support. Here Ukrainian civil society has been invaluable. Volunteer psychologists hold group sessions in shelters; theatre groups use play to help children narrate their own stories; mobile teams visit rural foster families; and faith communities organise respite weekends. None of this substitutes for clinical care when needed, but it stabilises family placements and gives children a language for what they have endured. The country’s best practice recognises that trauma-informed care is not a specialist add-on; it is the everyday tone of how teachers, doctors, judges and neighbours speak to a child.

Education is the bridge between emergency and normality. Schools have moved online, to double-shift schedules, and into basements. For war orphans placed far from their home oblasts, schools are also sites of integration. Yet bureaucracy can get in the way: lost transcripts, incompatible grading systems between regions, and debates over language of instruction for children who fled Russian-speaking towns now living in western districts. When a head teacher decides to enrol first and sort the files later, he or she does more than open a classroom door; they loosen the knot that ties a child to the identity of victimhood. Extracurricular activities—choirs, coding clubs, sport—carry the same quiet power. They are not distractions from trauma; they are the architecture of recovery.

Financing remains the unglamorous constraint. Allowances for guardians and foster parents exist, but inflation and displacement heighten costs for rent, food, winter clothing and travel. Local government budgets are under extraordinary pressure; donors prefer visible projects; and salaries for social workers have not kept pace with responsibility. The result is over-stretched case-loads and the risk of burnout. Ukraine has nonetheless cultivated a plural ecosystem: municipalities, international agencies, domestic charities and private philanthropies each fill gaps. The best outcomes emerge where partners trust one another and where data, however basic, are shared. War teaches that coordination is not a seminar topic; it is the difference between a child sleeping tonight in a safe bed or a temporary cot in a gymnasium.

Legal process matters as much as compassion. Guardianship orders should be timely; children ought to be heard in age-appropriate ways; appeal routes must exist without becoming labyrinths. Ukrainian judges and child protection officials have adapted admirably to remote hearings and to evidential improvisation when offices are rubble. But due process is not a peacetime luxury. It is what prevents a hurried mistake—separating siblings, assigning a child to an unsuitable carer, failing to look for relatives—from hardening into a life-long wound. Training in children’s rights for police, border guards and military administrators is therefore part of treatment, not an extra. A soldier at a checkpoint who knows the basics of guardianship papers may save a caregiver three days of travel and humiliation.

Two ethical questions trouble every practitioner. The first is publicity. War orphans attract cameras, and sympathy sells. Yet storytelling can slide into exploitation, and children have a right to privacy that outlasts the news cycle. Ukrainian media guidelines increasingly emphasise anonymisation, consent and the avoidance of images that freeze a child in her worst moment. The second is the temptation to build new institutions because they are visible and fundable. Bricks and mortar feel like progress; family-based care looks messy and slow. The evidence is the other way round. A nation that invests in families, training and small, skilled teams of social workers will give its war orphans a better adulthood than one that builds handsome orphanages.

What, then, constitutes good treatment in the present circumstances? First, an unembarrassed commitment to family-based solutions—kinship and foster care—backed by predictable financial support and relentless case management. Second, a legal posture that prizes identity and continuity over speed, especially for children separated across front lines or borders. Third, mental health support woven into everyday services rather than relegated to sporadic interventions. Fourth, schools that enrol first and administrate later, recognising that the classroom is a child’s frontier of recovery. Fifth, a diplomatic and legal campaign to locate, verify and return children unlawfully removed—a task that affirms the child’s rights without making her a pawn of propaganda. Finally, an ethic of humility among outside actors: to strengthen Ukrainian institutions rather than supplant them, to fund salaries as well as projects, and to stand still long enough to learn how communities already protect their own.

Ukraine’s treatment of war orphans is therefore not a single programme or a neat set of statistics. It is a mosaic of choices taken by grandparents at kitchen tables, foster parents in rented flats, overworked social workers with cheap smartphones, head teachers with spare uniforms in a cupboard, and judges on late-night video calls. It is imperfect and sometimes heroic; uneven yet animated by a national conviction that children belong to families and to a country that refuses to abandon them. In a war defined by the destruction of homes, the most meaningful answer Ukraine can offer its most vulnerable children is precisely a home—perhaps provisional, perhaps improvised, but recognisably theirs. That is not sentimentality. It is strategy: to ensure that the war’s orphans grow up as citizens with roots, names and memories that are not only of loss.