Ukraine's child refugees pose huge challenge for Europe

Concerns are mounting in countries that have received tens of thousands of Ukrainian children about the huge task of providing them with long-term mental care and schooling

Thousands of Ukrainian children who have found shelter in hastily converted housing facilities across central and eastern Europe are struggling to come to terms with their new reality as refugees fleeing Russia's invasion of their country.

According to figures released by UNICEF on Tuesday, children account for about a half of the more than 3 million Ukrainians who have crossed into Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Moldova since the invasion began on Feb. 24.

Countries bordering Ukraine have provided sanctuary to a seemingly unending flow of refugees. But authorities in those countries are facing the monumental task of providing long-term mental care to traumatized Ukrainian children.

Over the past 20 days an average of 55 children have been fleeing Ukraine every minute and the trend is unlikely to change as Russian forces continue their advance. New arrivals are expected to overwhelm underfunded and poorly managed public schools in tiny Moldova, but also in relatively affluent Poland - the fifth-most populous member state of the European Union - where classes are held in Polish, a language most Ukrainians do not speak.

Psychologists say young Ukrainian refugees appear unable to comprehend the longer-term nature of their absence from home and separation from their fathers, forbidden to leave Ukraine in order to fight the war.

Some of the children insist that they are on a short vacation or a school break, said Irina Purcari, a school psychologist in Chisinau who works with Ukrainian children at the biggest refugee center in Moldova’s capital.

Upon arriving at the center, “most children are alarmed, reluctant to make contact,” Purcari said. ”But we take the first steps to win them over and lower their anxiety levels."

Purcari said children speak of their fathers “not in the context of hostilities,” possibly as a way create a sense of calm and feel that their life is in order.

For 34 year-old Ukrainian Tamara Bercuta, her first full night's sleep after many weeks happened on Monday when she and her children arrived in Chisinau. She watched her 10 year-old daughter and 4 year-old son draw in a corner of the town’s biggest refugee center that has been converted into a play area. Like most other children, her son first reached for crayons in the colors of his country’s flag - blue and yellow.

“It is very bad when there is a war, a (mortar) shell hit a roadblock, many people died,” Bercuta said, recalling the horrors she and her children had witnessed during their flight from Mykolayiv, the strategic maritime Ukrainian city that witnessed fierce battles for days between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

“At home I was afraid because we were constantly (hiding) in corridors and in the basement,” her daughter, Liliya, interjected.

In Poland, which has taken in more than 1.8 million refugees from Ukraine, there are growing concerns about how to integrate those who elected to stay rather to relocate to other countries.

Before Russia’s invasion of their country, around 1.5 million Ukrainians lived in Poland. Many of new refugees are expected to remain in Poland as well, where they have friends and relatives.

In a six-story business center in central Warsaw that serves as a home for the most vulnerable refugees, Irina Panasevicz, an Ukraine-born volunteer, said her days consisted of endless calls to area day care facilities and schools to find places for newly arrived children.

“Kids have big problems to adapt in classrooms because classes are conducted in Polish and most children from Ukraine do not speak Polish,” Panasevicz said.

Despite them many obstacles they face, Ukrainian children of differed ages mingled and played in a long hallway outside Panasevicz’s office in the building they now call home.

For them, what was a normal childhood a few weeks ago has been supplanted by the fear of invading Russian soldiers.

“Russia is making war with Ukraine, we want Russia not to take us,” said 7-year-old Bogdan Kolesnik, wiggling nervously on his mother’s lap.

“We want to return home, but we do not know when that will be possible,” said 14-year-old Juna Berzika as she sat with her mother Svitlana and a group of other women recounting the horror of escaping Ukraine and the fear of what male relatives left behind will face.

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Pawel Kuczynski in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this report