IN PHOTOS | The last 2 children in a Ukrainian village scarred by war

Before Russia invaded Ukraine, Varvara Tupkalenko’s two sons played at home with miniature cars, like many boys their age.

Today, plastic guns are the favoured toys in their living room in the village of Kalynove, just 15 kilometres from the Russian border in the northeastern Kharkiv region.

Instead of scampering across playgrounds, Andrii, 8, and Maksym, 6, climb through abandoned trenches and charred shells of armoured vehicles that sit on the outskirts of the village.

A woman walks down a dirt road with two boys holding toy guys under a blue sky.
Varvara Tupkalenko, 30, walks with her sons Maksym Tupkalenko, 6, and Andrii Tupkalenko, 8, as they hold Nerf guns, their favourite toys. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

“They’re kids afflicted by war,” said Tupkalenko.

Europe’s largest land conflict since the Second World War is reshaping the fabric of ravaged Ukrainian frontier communities like Kalynove and leaving unseen as well as visible injuries on their youngest.

A childs hands hold fragments of a grenade that are red with rust.
Andrii shows to the camera pieces of a spent hand grenade, which were found around his home in Kalynove, Ukraine. His mother is forced to make stark choices for the sake of her children, whose father Yurii was killed on the front line in 2023. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

The invisible scars can range from anxiety and fear to longer-term effects like poverty, depression and impaired emotional development, international aid agency Save the Children said in a report in February.

“This is how a lost generation becomes a reality,” the report said.

“The longer the conflict continues, the more likely it is that these children will grow up without the opportunities and resources necessary to recover and normalize their lives.”

A man pours a drink into a glass for a young child in a kitchen with food on the table.
Volodymyr Tkachenko, 66, pours his grandson Maksym a fizzy beverage at their family home in Kalynove, Kharkiv region, Ukraine. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

Last remaining children

In late March, when Reuters first visited the Tupkalenkos, the boys were among the six remaining children in shrapnel-marked Kalynove, whose landscape of wide-open fields and gently rolling hills bears the scars of fighting from early in Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

Now, their mother said, they are the last two.

A boy in a bright coloured jacket sits in the net of a large trampoline near debris in a yard.
Andrii sits by himself on a trampoline after a quarrel with his younger brother, Maksym, at home. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

A Ukrainian counteroffensive in late 2022 pushed Russian troops back from the village outskirts, but both armies still trade blows just 20 kilometres away, leaving the Tupkalenkos struggling to live some semblance of a normal childhood.

That often means playing soldiers and setting up make-believe checkpoints to vet fellow villagers. Cloth netting adorns their wooden fort — protection, they said, from the drones that have leant a new-age deadliness to the war.

A man holds the arms of a young boy and lowers him into a reddish military vehicle under a blue sky.
Volodymyr Tkachenko, 66, plays with his grandson Maksym Tupkalenko, 6, on the charred carcass of a military vehicle in the outskirts of the village of Kalynove. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

Varvara, for her part, is forced to make stark choices for the sake of her children, whose father Yurii was killed on the front line in 2023.

When fighting intensifies, she takes them back to the family’s apartment in nearby Kharkiv, the regional capital. But Ukraine’s second city is itself a major target, and the swarms of drones that pound it at night terrify the boys, she said.

“The kids keep crying, asking to come back to the village,” she told Reuters during one of two visits to Kalynove. “There are spaces here to play, to walk, to ride bikes. There are no chances for that in the city.”

A boy extends his arm holding a drone in a room with white wallpaper.
Andrii Tupkalenko, 8, plays with a drone at his home in Kalynove, Ukraine. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)
Two boys ride a blue coloured ATV through a yard strewn with debris
Brothers Andrii and Maksym ride a quad bike past a bomb crater filled with debris, at the site of an airstrike in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

More than 3.5 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced by Russia’s war, at least 737,000 of whom have been children, according to the United Nations.

That number is growing as Russian forces press a grinding advance across much of eastern Ukraine, whose vast landscape has been decimated by fighting that has got heavier during a summer offensive, including in the Kharkiv area.

In Kalynove, where the family uses their vegetable storage basement as a bomb shelter, the boys roam relatively freely, buying potato chips from a largely bare village store and helping their grandfather with home repairs.

A white cat stands outside of a the entrance of a brick cellar.
A cat stands in front of the entrance to a bomb shelter, which used to be a vegetable storage basement, in the Ukrainian frontline village. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

Playing on contaminated land

In his yard, shell casings serve as the beginning of a makeshift footpath. Occasionally, the boys turn up jagged pieces of shrapnel or the remains of hand grenades, a dangerous reality in a country widely contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO).

At least 30 children have been killed and 120 wounded by mines or UXO in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, according to the United Nations’ human rights office.

Two boys stand in a building near a brick wall that was been destroyed holding toy guns.
The brothers, who spend time playing soldiers and setting up make-believe checkpoints to vet fellow villagers. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

After fleeing in the first weeks of the invasion, the Tupkalenkos returned in 2023 following the Ukrainian rout of Russian troops in much of the Kharkiv region.

Still, safety is precarious for communities along Ukraine’s sprawling border with Russia. Hours before Reuters’ second visit, a glide bomb tore into the edge of Kalynove, rattling their house and shaking bits of ceiling free.

Another strike targeted the area hours later.

A childs hand grabs a net in sunshine.
Maksym holds an anti-drone net that covers the makeshift fort he made. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

Neither Andrii nor Maksym has ever set foot in a classroom because Russia’s invasion extended the remote learning over the internet that began during the COVID-19 epidemic, depriving more than one million of Ukraine’s seven million children of social contact critical to development, according to the Save the Children report.

Around the same number risk developing post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, it said.

Standing in front of a wall-mounted map inside their home, Andrii talks about his father’s death in a matter-of-fact manner, but with pride.

A young boy stands in a beam of light in a wall with an old map on it.
Andrii imitates the movement and sound of automatic fire to describe the death of his father Yurii Tupkalenko, 28, a Ukrainian soldier killed during a Russian assault in the area of Klishchiivka. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

“If he hadn’t gone on the assault, he wouldn’t have died,” he said, pointing to the village of Klishchiivka, just south of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

Kateryna Holtsberh, a family psychologist who practices in Kyiv, said the consequences of such losses and traumatic wartime experiences can extend into adulthood.

In some cases, she said, the shocks of war can blunt a child’s emotional awareness, hampering their development.

War can leave children struggling to realize “when another person is feeling pain,” Holtsberh said.

A boy wearing a black hat walks through a ditch dug into a field with tall grass under a blue sky.
Maksym plays in a trench dug by Ukrainian forces in the outskirts of the village of Kalynove. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

Like many Ukrainian adults who have suffered horrors in the war, one emotion the Tupkalenko boys express clearly is their anger at the Russians whose invasion their father died fighting.

They say “they are murderers” who killed their father, she said.

“‘We will go to the Donbas and avenge him,'” they say.

in-photos-the-last-2-children-in-a-ukrainian-village-scarred-by-war

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *