By AFP and Kontur | 2025-06-27

Natalia Golovanyk would probably have stayed in her village in east Ukraine, even with Russian forces closing in, but authorities issued an order for children to be taken to safety.

That meant the 30-year-old had little choice but to urgently pack up her home and seven children -- all under the age of 13 -- and leave their lives behind.

"It's already noisy there and very scary for the children. If we didn't have children, we would have stayed," she told AFP at a center for evacuees in Dnipropetrovsk province.

"Everything is still there. Our car is there. Everything is left there. I am very sad. We worked so hard for 10 years, and now everything is gone," she added.

Russian tanks and infantry swooped over the Ukrainian border more than three years ago. Moscow failed to capture the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in its full-scale invasion and was then pushed back in a rout that embarrassed the Kremlin.

But Russian forces have been clawing forward across the sprawling front line in eastern Ukraine since late 2022. The fighting is now nearing Golovanyk's home of town of Slovianka, as Russian forces threaten to gain a foothold for the first time in industrial Dnipropetrovsk province.

Golovanyk hopes to move with her family to western Ukraine, find housing, work and enroll her children in school.

'Why ... risk their lives?'

"Every evacuation is improvised. Everyone requires a different approach," said Oleksiy Prima, the regional coordinator of the Proliska humanitarian organization coordinating the evacuations.

"The most important and painful systemic problem that we face every day is still the security situation. These are drones that strike civilians and evacuation mission vehicles," the 29-year-old told AFP.

The orders to flee Dnipropetrovsk -- issued over the last several months -- follow a painful precedent: Ukrainian authorities say that more than 634 children have been killed and 1,987 wounded since Russia invaded in February 2022.

Like most tolls of verified civilian casualties from the war, those numbers are likely to be an underestimate.

Nadiia Gavrylova was among those leaving with her four young children from the town of Mezhova near the eastern border of Dnipropetrovsk province that Russian forces are advancing towards.

"We really don't want to leave, but we have to. We have to do it for the children," the 33-year-old told AFP outside her house scarred by fighting.

Staying was not an option, she said, and not only because of the mandatory orders from authorities to evacuate.

"We've all seen it on television, and those who haven't seen it on television have seen it with their own eyes, how houses are destroyed," she said.

"And if there are children there, why hide them and risk their lives in the first place?"

Millions of children abroad

Another tragedy unfolding in Ukraine involves children forced to flee abroad. Since the start of the full-scale war, about 1.4 million school-age children have left the country temporarily, according to a March 25 Facebook post by the commissioner for human rights of the Ukrainian parliament.

"The full-scale invasion has deepened the demographic crisis that had been unfolding in Ukraine for some time. If current trends continue, the country will find itself in a state of irreversible demographic catastrophe," said Svitlana Aksenova, chief researcher at the Institute of Demography and Quality of Life Problems of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences.

Every family needs to have at least two children to sustain Ukraine's population, she said.

"One child replaces the father; one child replaces the mother. And we usually say there should be 22 births per 10 women. If there are too few children, it poses a demographic threat to the country's very existence," Aksenova told Kontur.