Lorents is 17 years old. He wears his 53-year old father’s gloves in his honour. His is one of the stories in the War Childhood Museum in Kyiv.
War Childhood
The Museum was started by Jasminko Halilović, Director General of the War Childhood museum in Sarajevo. He published ‘War Childhood’, a collection of quotes from his peers.
In 2017, Halilović came to Ukraine, visited Donetsk, assisted volunteers, and sought to record children’s testimonies about the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The effort couldn’t be managed from abroad. Ukraine is (603,628 km² vs. Bosnia’s 51,209 km²). A museum branch was opened in Ukraine in 2020. The Ukrainian team collects children’s testimonies and items from across Ukraine and refugees and organizes regular exhibitions domestically and internationally.
Svitlana Gunchenko, Children of War, 2022
Kostiantyn Cherniavskyi, Stolen Childhood, 2023
On September 18, 2024, during a meeting with the German Bundestag delegation, Dmytro Lubinets, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, stated that 1,609 Ukrainian children were injured and 575 killed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. The actual numbers are likely worse due to lack of data from occupied areas of Ukraine.
In mid-2023, the Russian authorities claimed that 700,000 children from Ukraine had been “evacuated to Russia”. The Ukrainian authorities argue that these were not humanitarian evacuations but illegal deportations or abductions.
Last March, the Hague-based International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for the war crime of unlawfully deporting children from areas of Ukraine occupied by Russian forces.
1,247 children have been brought back to Ukraine from Russian-occupied territories as of March 2025. Human rights activists estimate that at least 1.6 million Ukrainian children remain under Russian control.
My Father’s Gloves
Lorents from Kyiv, is one of the stories in the Ukrainian War Childhood museum.
“My father’s gloves. I used to wear them with his military uniform, his body armor, and his helmet (a hard hat with headphones). He brought me these gloves at the beginning of the war.
They mean a lot to me. In them, I see a part of my father. He is 53 years old. He could have stayed at home, since he is in the reserves. But he decided that Article 54 of the Constitution—about the sacred duty of every citizen to protect the sovereignty and independence of our state—was a call he needed to follow. As a citizen, he went, unafraid; he did not flee abroad, did not give bribes. He set an example for me, showing me that, even in difficult moments, we all have a choice. I am proud of him.” Lorents, 17 years old 
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