By Galina Korol | 2025-05-07

KYIV -- More than a decade since Russia first occupied Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, Ukraine, the territorial conflict has deepened into a parallel war over identity.

In towns and cities cut off from Kyiv's control, Ukrainian children have grown up under a system designed to erase their national consciousness, where schools ban the Ukrainian language, state TV rewrites history and allegiance to Russia is taught as fact.

Yet amid the silence, a generation is quietly resisting: learning Ukrainian in secret, forging connections online and risking everything to reclaim the identity denied to them.

'Freedom. It's here'

Ivan Sarancha left Luhansk just after turning 18, traveling through Belarus to reach the rest of Ukraine, a country he barely remembered but had long considered his own.

"I still can't believe that everything worked out," Sarancha told Kontur.

He was seven when Russian forces occupied his city in 2014. At a first-grade assembly, he saw the Ukrainian flag in the schoolyard. "I'll remember it forever," he said. "Because I never saw it again after that."

From then on, his entire life under occupation was shaped by relentless propaganda and what he called "brainwashing" by Russian authorities.

"They completely re-educate you in their own way, completely destroy any Ukrainian identity. They don't prove you aren't Ukrainian but straightaway say that you're Russian," he said.

On top of it all, he had no support at home.

"Mom said she hated Ukrainian. My parents have always supported Russia. They liked the USSR. They often traveled to Russia," said Sarancha.

At 12, a chance encounter online with teenagers from Dnipro changed everything. They told him he was not their enemy but a fellow Ukrainian living under occupation. It sparked something. He began searching for truth, switching to Ukrainian in his online chats, learning the language word by word.

Sarancha spent a year quietly planning his escape. "There wasn't a day I didn't remember I was planning," he said. "It was very psychologically oppressive."

What he feared most was discovery by his parents and that the plan would fall apart before it began.

As the situation in Luhansk deteriorated and men began to be drafted into the Russian army, Sarancha's turning 18 made departure an urgent matter. He took a part-time job, saved money and convinced his mother to help him apply for a passport by saying he wanted to visit nearby countries.

On the day of his escape, he told his parents he was headed to Rostov, Russia. Instead, he traveled to Minsk, Belarus, where the Ukrainian embassy issued him a white passport, an emergency travel document to return home.

At the border, he saw something that stunned him: "a Ukrainian soldier -- for the first time in my life."

Many children want to return to Ukraine

Kateryna Fedosenko, a children's rights lawyer with the Ukrainian charity Save Ukraine, told Kontur that many young people in Russian-occupied territory still hope to escape to the Kyiv-controlled part of Ukraine. Her organization, the country's largest network for rescuing children from occupied areas whom the occupiers forcibly took to Russia, helped Sarancha reach Kyiv.

Attempts to flee are increasing each year, despite tighter restrictions, said Fedosenko.

"Checkpoints. Filtration measures. They do everything [in occupied territory] to make sure these children don't leave but stay and join the soldiers," she said.

Children in occupied areas face constant pressure to conform to the ideology of the "Russian world," and expressions of pro-Ukrainian sentiment often meet with hostility.

"You can't express your position out loud there, because you could be prosecuted," Irina Kasyanenko, a journalist with Suspilne Sumy, told Kontur.

'Window into another world'

In April, Kasyanenko reported on an 18-year-old girl who fled occupied Donetsk for Ukrainian-controlled Sumy.

"I'm very emotional right now... I finally saw the Ukrainian flag for the first time in so many years... I see Ukrainians speaking Ukrainian...," the girl says in the beginning of the video.

She is identified as Marina to protect her identity, as her parents, who openly support Russia, remain in occupied territory.

On March 5, the day she turned 18, Marina left Russian-occupied Donetsk without telling her parents or saying goodbye. Her backpack held only essentials; in her head was a route through Russia and Belarus. What she wanted was simple: to live in Ukraine.

"This is my dream. I'm just smiling from ear to ear…" said Marina, talking about crossing the Ukrainian border.

Originally from Makiivka near Donetsk, Marina had lived under occupation since she was seven -- though, as a child, she hadn't understood what that meant. "I thought it was normal," she recalled. "Nothing was operating. Nothing was being built."

Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 marked a turning point. Her friends from Mariupol vanished without explanation. "Even now, I don't know where they are and whether they are alive," she said.

Around the same time, Marina began connecting online with young people from Kyiv. One in particular became a "window onto another world," explaining the war in eastern Ukraine, the Maidan (the anti-Kremlin movement in Ukraine) and what was really happening in the country. "He said to me, 'You're living in Ukraine, just under occupation.'"

That conversation upended her worldview. She began researching, comparing narratives and made up her mind: "I decided for myself that I would definitely go to Ukraine when I turn 18."

While still in 10th grade, Marina enrolled in a Ukrainian distance learning program without telling her parents. She also contacted Save Ukraine to escape.

She told her parents she was going to Taganrog, Russia, with friends. Two days later, she was en route to Belarus. At the Ukrainian embassy, she received a white passport, the document that would finally take her home to Ukraine.