Ivan chose a special day to escape: his birthday. Above all, he wanted to avoid being conscripted by Russia to fight against Ukraine – the country he considers his true homeland – when he turned 18 years old.
“Young men from Luhansk are getting mobilized all the time,” says Ivan, who now lives in Kyiv, striking a sharp figure in sunglasses, a leather jacket, and a mane of dark hair. “They’ll force you to go to war.”
Ivan had spent many years of his childhood debating his parents at the dinner table. Luhansk came under the control of the Russian-backed Luhansk People’s Republic in 2014, and his parents were mostly fine with that. They felt more connected to Moscow than to Kyiv.
Why We Wrote This
In Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine, a battle is on over national identity. Russia wants Ukrainians to feel Russian, and teens are the front line.
But Ivan did not. Through a fellow gamer in Ukraine, he discovered Ukrainian news, music, and culture. Gradually, he felt more informed, more Ukrainian – and more trapped.
Telling his parents he’d celebrate his 18th birthday in Moscow, Ivan headed for Ukrainian-held territory. He arrived on the day he became an adult.
Ivan’s story is more than a tale of teenage rebellion or wartime daring. It is the story of a generation of Ukrainian youth who have become pawns in Russia’s attempts to rewire the identities of the Ukrainian territories it now controls.
In Luhansk and another breakaway Russian-backed territory, the Donetsk People’s Republic, children have grown up amid intense efforts to convince them they are not Ukrainian. Even wearing the Ukrainian colors of blue and gold at school was banned. The result, for some, has been an erosion of their sense of Ukrainian identity that now leaves them feeling that nowhere is home.
Meanwhile, in regions occupied by the Russian military since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, that feeling is more acute. The forced imposition of “Russianness” has just begun. In both cases, teens already besieged by all the questions and uncertainties of teenhood are now being asked to choose a national identity that can feel foreign and at times hostile.
Some teens have fled with family support. Others have escaped through smuggling networks. All now face questions of belonging.
“The impact on their identity and sense of belonging is huge,” says Olena Rozvadovska, co-founder of the Voices of Children foundation, which supports young people affected by the war. “Knowing the answer to questions like, Where will I live? Where will I go to university? This is very important for psychological health.”
Valentyna, a teenager with long blond hair parted to the side, lives with her sister and studies in Kyiv, but her sense of belonging remains unsettled. (As with all the young people interviewed for this story, her last name has been withheld for her and her family’s safety. Valentyna also asked that pseudonym be used.) While she was in elementary school, her hometown of Donetsk found itself part of the self-declared and Russian-supported Donetsk People’s Republic. The change became evident when the Ukrainian language disappeared from classrooms.
“It was impossible to speak Ukrainian in public,” she recalls. “You couldn’t say you were Ukrainian. My sister and I couldn’t even wear blue-and-yellow outfits. At first, I wasn’t aware enough to grasp the scale of the change. I just thought, these are the new rules.”
One day, when she was in third grade, the students were asked, How do you see yourself? A Ukrainian boy stood up and said in Russian, “I am Ukrainian.” She felt the same – but stayed seated like the rest of the class.
Ivan had a similar experience in Luhansk. Some residents there supported Russia, others Ukraine. Many were indifferent. But the prevailing mood was silence. “Even private conversations about the war were rare,” he says. “No one dared to openly support Ukraine.”
In Ukraine, but not home
In summer 2024, armed with a Russian passport, Valentyna navigated a complex escape route with her parents’ help, crossing into Ukraine in the Sumy region, benefiting from the only still-operational crossing point between Russia and Ukraine.
Though she was relieved to join her sister in Kyiv, her experiences and language set her apart. While she spoke Ukrainian at home, she lacks the fluency and idioms that come naturally to her classmates.
“I feel like we don’t have a lot in common with most of my peers here,” she says. “I can’t tell them much about our past, and I cannot relate to their experiences. I’d like to tell them more about Donetsk and my experiences, to show my true face and talk about my past, but I feel like I cannot do that without putting my parents at risk in some way.”
In Russian-occupied Ukraine and the two so-called republics, children have been illegally deported, often separated from their parents and subjected to psychological manipulation at summer camps. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, at least 19,500 Ukrainian children have been forcibly taken to Russia, according to authorities in Kyiv.
Mykola Kuleba worries the figure could be much higher. As the head of Save Ukraine, he has played a key role in rescuing children from Russia and occupied territories. Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, claimed in July 2023 that Russia had taken about 700,000 children from Ukraine and the republics.
“We have no official stats,” says Mr. Kuleva. “Who are they? How many of them are unaccompanied minors? How many of them are in Russian orphanages or in Russian families, whether adopted or in foster care? These are Ukrainian children but with Russian passports. They’ve been Russified.”
Machine guns at the door
Vlad, a 19-year-old with caramel-colored eyes who now lives on the outskirts of Kyiv, was rescued by his mother after being forcibly taken from Russian-occupied Kherson to Crimea; he had been in Russian hands since 2014.
On the morning of Oct. 7, 2022, three masked Russian officers with machine guns showed up at their apartment. The family had been under pressure to send at least one of its children to Russian school or risked having them placed in foster care.
“We were living on the fifth floor, so I couldn’t even jump from the balcony,” says Vlad, who was a student at a maritime college. Later, he found himself along with about a hundred fellow students being bused across the Dnieper River.
On the other side, they were given temporary papers at a checkpoint. “I realized then it was likely a one-way journey,” he says. He lived in two camps before his mother tracked him down and persuaded the Russian authorities to let him go.
At the first camp, he says, he was pressured to deny his Ukrainian heritage and pledge allegiance to the Russian flag. “The administration was giving out certificates to those who stood out for their loyalty to Russia,” he says. “There were promises of Russian nationality and an apartment.”
But he was not swayed. He kept the Ukrainian flag on his wall. One day, he replaced the Russian flag in the courtyard with his underwear. This cost him six days in isolation and a transfer to a stricter camp. “It changed me,” he says, suggesting that the experience marked the end of childhood.
Not everyone is as resilient as Vlad. In areas seized by Russia, children sometimes have lived for months in basements due to the fighting. Then, says Ms. Rozvadovska of Voices of Children, “The Russians arrive with their propaganda machine. If you’ve lived through two months of shelling without food or water, and someone shows up with a piece of bread and a bottle of water saying they’ve rescued you … it’s very difficult in that moment to keep your critical mind and say to them, ‘No, you bombed us.’”
Working with such children, “The first six months are just about building trust,” she says. “There are no miracles – only time.”
Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this article.
