“First, there was a heavy blow to the back. I fell, I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t move,” he told CNN on Thursday, pointing to the spot behind his school where he was hit. “People ran and picked me up. I couldn’t even walk. There was a lot of blood.” The next day, the teenager was airlifted by Russian troops across the border to Belarus for treatment along with their wounded soldiers. Photos of his injuries, shared with CNN, show a deep wound to his shoulder. A medical report from the Gomel Regional Children’s Clinical Hospital, where he was treated, said he suffered an open fracture of the shoulder blade, fractured ribs and a deep bruise to the right lung. Over the next month, Serhii had no contact with his family and underwent major surgery twice. His mother, Svitlana Sorokopud, said Russian soldiers in Yahidne took all the residents’ cellphones and, cut off from the outside world, she had no way of knowing where her son had gone. “It’s indescribable when you don’t know where your child is,” she said. “I cried day and night. He had such a bad injury and I didn’t know where he was.” It wasn’t just the physical injuries that plagued her son, but the anguish of being separated from his family, she said. “At first she couldn’t even sleep there and she had nightmares. He was worried that we wouldn’t pick him up.” Serhii only got in touch with his parents after the Russians began their retreat on March 30 and his family was able to buy a new mobile phone and regain internet access. They say a Belarusian doctor had posted Serhii’s name, date of birth and hometown on social media. “Parents, perhaps, [are] in Yahide,” the post read. “Please spread the word so they know the boy is alive.” When they found out where he was, Svitlana said they talked on the phone every day for about a month, assuring him they would come. His 25-year-old sister crossed the border into Poland and then into Belarus in early May to pick him up. Now, in Yahidne, there are burnt houses on every street. Outside the house where Serhii and his family now live, his 9-year-old brother and young nephew pretend to operate a checkpoint. The specter of a new Russian attack on northern Ukraine is never far from their minds. “There is no fear now,” Serhii said. “But sometimes I wonder what will happen if they come back and what they will do.” As the war stretches into its sixth month, the impact on Ukraine’s children is evident in the grim toll of young lives cut short. On a new Ukrainian government website, “Children of War,” the toll rises against a black screen: 361 dead and 703 wounded at last count. However, the impact is not only physical, but psychological, said Darya Gerasimchuk, the Ukrainian president’s commissioner for children’s rights. “Absolutely every child of Ukraine is affected… Every child has heard air raid warnings. Children see the suffering of their relatives and friends. Children are forced to say goodbye to parents who go to defend the country on the front lines. There are those who are still in custody. Those who are injured. In other words, absolutely every child in Ukraine has pretty serious psychological and physical injuries,” Gerasimchuk said in an interview with CNN last week. Most of Ukraine’s children have left the front lines and nearly two-thirds have been displaced, either within the country or across the border as refugees, according to UNICEF in June. In the same month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “Russia is stealing our children’s childhood, they want to destroy our future.” Human Rights Watch said Russia’s invasion “immediately suspended the education of 5.7 million children aged 3 to 17, many of whom had already missed months of education due to deadly school attacks in eastern Ukraine or Covid-19. closing schools”. Many schools in Ukraine have resumed classes, according to the World Bank, but they are almost entirely online. While some semblance of normal life returns to the streets of Kyiv, Jenya Nikitina — a shy 7-year-old — knows this uneasy calm can be shattered in an instant. She was sleeping when multiple Russian rockets struck the capital’s western Shevchenkivskyi district on the morning of June 26, hitting her family’s apartment building. Her father, Oleksii, was killed. Jenya and her mother, Katerina Volkova, a 35-year-old Russian national, were trapped for hours. Her mother remembers the moment she heard Jenya scream, confirming that she was still alive. “There was no happiness [at] right now I could hear her,” she told CNN, sitting next to her daughter outside a school gymnasium in the Chokolivka district of Kyiv, before Jenya’s Saturday morning gym class. “It was even more awful because I was thinking [that] she was also in pain… I told her “Someone will come”. Did I believe in it? That’s another question.” Xenia, who was trapped for a few hours, suffered a concussion and multiple abrasions. Her mother, trapped for five hours, suffered burns, deep cuts and a fracture. Weeks later, it is her daughter’s psychological signs that worry Katerina the most. Asked if it is possible for a child to understand what has happened, his voice breaks. “I’m not sure we adults understand emotionally what’s going on.” Just in case the sirens start again, Jenya’s fitness classes are the only time they’re apart. Jumping on the mat is a chance to heal and, for a while, forget. Katerina worries that fear is now too familiar for her daughter. “The [her childhood] was taken… in the future there will be happy moments and many parents are still trying to fix those moments for them,” he said, adding that the children had experienced “too much”. Katerina added that she “couldn’t imagine” that her daughter would grow up in an environment where she could recognize the sounds of sirens, rockets and gunfire. “It’s not what you expect your child to learn at the age of seven.” “The scariest thing is this [children] you think it’s already normal. They talk about it like it’s their everyday life.”
