Waiting for my Dad - Ukraine's children of the missing

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0:57Rise and shine in Western Ukraine.

1:03Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Will Vernon and this is Assignment at a special summer camp in the Carpathian Mountains. It's just after eight in the morning and the kids at the camp are being woken up by Ukrainian pop songs and they're emerging from their rooms quite bleary-eyed, actually. And the first activity of the morning is exercise and they've got a packed schedule for the day ahead.

1:31We have a really busy programme because kids, if they have five free minutes, they are just doing chaos. You need only five minutes for that and they are doing some crazy stuff. This is a camp for the children of Ukraine's missing. 50 of them, aged between 7 and 17, with one thing in common. They all have a parent who's disappeared in the war. We've been given exclusive access to this pioneering project, the first camp of its kind. We're spending several days with the children, camp staff and psychologists. Many of these children have multiple traumas because not only their fathers are missing, but some of them have uncles missing, grandfathers missing and we are working with all of it, like one huge painful hole that we are trying to heal.

2:33Vanwii Matyresyan is the chief psychologist of Gen Ukrainian, the charity running this two-week camp. This type of trauma is really difficult and there is no ready programme for children. ambiguous loss is really difficult to cope with because there is no closed point. Tell me, what is ambiguous loss? So, ambiguous loss is the type of loss where you do not know whether your loved ones are alive or dead, whether your house is okay or destroyed, whether your future is defined or no. So, the main feature of this is ambiguity, uncertainty. So they're living like in a frozen state. They are waiting.

3:20They do not know how to move on. And that makes this type of trauma maybe the most difficult to work with.

3:36There's about 50 kids here, most of them wearing a white T-shirt with the charity's logo on it. and they're jumping and running on the spot and doing stretching. Still quite early here in the Carpathian Mountains, bit of a grey morning, and a lot of the kids here look quite tired. They're yawning. But this is a great way to start the day. Jen Ukrainian's logo is a red heart, drawn by a child with the words, Love Heals Wounds. It's become a kind of motto for this camp. And now they're all pretending to be cats. This is a cat dance.

4:16Even though it's early and it's a bit cold and grey and they're being forced to come outside and do this exercise, the kids do seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves. And that's one of the key parts of this camp, is to just let kids be kids, just have fun, as well as the art therapy, the sport therapy and the counselling. They're just here to have a good time as well.

4:44Nine o 'clock sharp, quiet descends. Right across the country and here in the camp as they hold a minute's silence to remember the fallen of this war.

5:06Followed by the national anthem.

5:10Then it's breakfast time.

5:17Dad was always very good to us. He's very kind. He always spoiled me. He had a sweet tooth like me and bought me sweets a lot. Nastya's father disappeared around a year ago. He was serving in the Ukrainian army on the front line. Nastya, who is 16, lives with her mother in Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine. As with all the children at the camp, we spoke to her with a psychologist present.

5:45When he came home from work, he'd bring my favourite chocolate bar or sweets. He used to come home and say, Nastya, here you are. And I used to think, Dad's spoiling me again. Can you tell me when you last saw your dad?

6:03It was in the city of Poltava. We went there for two days because Dad was training there. He was given permission to leave the military college and we went to the city centre and had a walk. Dad and I had pizza. And then the next day he came to our hotel and we had grilled meat. That was the last time I saw him. It was two weeks before he disappeared.

6:28I remember only the good things about Dad. The only sad thing I remember is that he went missing. I'm just glad that I've got memories of the happy times with him.

6:43There are two very excitable dogs in here, Lola and Olaf.

6:50Now it's time for a therapy session. So the kids have finished cleaning their rooms and now they're going to be discussing things like grieving and their fears. and therapy sessions take place every day at the camp, both individual and group therapy. And today this is really hard. Rosalie is one of the camp staff showing us around. Grieving is really hard for kids and in the evenings I will have a ceremony for saying goodbye and trying to...

7:28Rostislav is here helping me with some of the translation. So in the evening there's going to be a grieving session of saying goodbye by the bonfire with kids and mentors and everybody else. It's like a ceremony for them. And how old are the kids in here? 11, 13 years old.

7:57We were allowed to observe the group therapy for just a few minutes at the beginning of the session. The rest of it is confidential. Rostislav told us what was said inside. So today the psychologist said that it's a hard topic and they're going to speak about being sad, feelings that are unpleasant, and that the more unpleasant and sad we feel, the more we love the people who are we sad about. and that we show us and others that these people are important for us. And that let's discuss today in what zone are we? Is it yellow, green or blue? And how are we feeling about it today? And so there's actually a poster on the wall with the different colours, blue, green, yellow and red.

8:47And each of those indicate how the kids are feeling. Green is a little happy face, so the kids are feeling good today. And red is sad, angry. Yeah, and then yellow portrays emotions of being anxious. Right, and blue is sad. One child in particular said that she was feeling sad because of the foggy weather today. And it was a good side from a psychologist to say, well, it's going to be foggy only today and it's going to be a good weather tomorrow. And then the rest of the group explained that they were feeling either green or yellow, and mainly green, so it seemed like children were in a good mood for today.

9:34So the kids are standing in a circle, practising volleyball moves. We're in an absolutely enormous indoor sports hall. And the seats at the side of the hall are painted yellow and blue in the Ukrainian colours.

9:55Sport is a key part of the programme here. The psychologists say it's crucial to helping heal trauma. Some of them are afraid to cry. For example, we have some children who started to cry during the individual sessions and they feel fear of crying because they think that if they start crying, it will continue forever, so they cannot control this sadness. And many of them have huge aggression to the world because it is unfair that they face these difficulties, especially for teenagers. And they have difficulties to control this aggression and they feel afraid of this anger and they try to pump it down in order not to feel it because control is difficult.

10:47You're saying the kids are afraid to cry because they think that if they start crying they'll cry forever. I mean it's terribly sad. It's terribly sad. How do you feel when you are with these kids? It is really difficult for us. It is the most difficult group for us because we really see that they need our help but we can make only small steps. And when they start crying and telling us that for them it is a big fear, we feel sadness too because we are people. We cannot be only in professional position and we only can hold them in this moment because this uncertainty is really horrible.

11:31One thing these children don't get much of is access to their mobile phones, which they hand in at the start of the camp. They only get them back for an hour each evening. After a few days of noisy protests, the phones were quickly forgotten and the kids became much more interested in the camp activities. Can you tell me what the kids are doing here? So here we are working on plasticine to make some pictures and here you can see the flowers because, as you know... The kids are saying hello to us while we're talking. The children are going through different grief stages. And one of these is anger.

12:14And it helps them when they work with their fingers and put the plasticine on the paper. It helps them to release anger. And it helps them to transform their emotions from anger to a more calm state. As we can hear. Yeah, yeah. You can hear that. Just tell me your name. Introduce yourself. Okay. So my name is Helena. I'm 23 years old. and I'm here as a tutor and I'm studying clinical psychology. So it's the littler kids in this room, aged between 7 and 11. There are about 12 or 15 of them, so they're sticking the plasticine to little square pieces of cardboard and making different shapes and patterns.

13:00I think I can see some sort of blue monster being made down there. That is quite cool. One little girl is just holding up her creation. she's stuck plasticine on a piece of cardboard and she's made what looks like a cat surrounded by fish I think the cat's hunting for the fish perhaps in a bowl which looks quite nice and I can also see a sunset made out of plasticine as well they're actually really good everything what we do here is related to help them to express these emotions and go through all these grief stages with us together We try to help them to talk more and to release everything but they're not telling their parents, not telling their close ones.

13:51Gen Ukrainian has held a number of summer camps for other groups of children, including for those who were abducted and taken to Russia before being repatriated. But this is the first camp specifically for the children of the missing. Oksana Lebedeva is the founder of the charity. For many of them, it is the first time for last years they have in a safe environment. And basically we give them their childhood back. You know, the children's psyche need clarity, need safety and simplicity. And these children sometimes feel guilty because of their grief if father is still alive. And these children are stuck in the middle of hope and despair.

14:40Every single day they are waiting for the message from the parents. And how serious is that trauma? I believe it is a challenge of our time. It is the most painful and least understood trauma. Unlike a confirmed death, these children who experience this kind of trauma have no possibility and have no chance to say goodbye to their parents. More than 70 ,000 of adults are missing, so you can imagine how children are suffering. What kind of things do you see these children doing? There's so much involved always looking for their parents themselves. They spend a lot of time in social media, but special channels, Russian channels, and they are looking for the information about their parents.

15:34So they are seeing so much tortures, corpse. It's a violence content. So like extreme videos? Extreme videos for them. And there's so much traumatized for their psyche as well. So these are videos from the war showing torture and executions and that kind of thing? Absolutely, yes, because they don't have information. Children need information. And not only children, of course, it's deep trauma. You can only help a certain amount of children, right? You only have the resources and the space to help a relatively small amount of children. But there are many, many tens of thousands of families out there who need help.

16:17So how big is the job that you have to do? the challenge is huge. But we are now on the forefront of psychological research due to our immense societal trauma we are enduring. So this job is to know as much as possible about this trauma, to be with our children as a supportive society, to share and to spread the expertise through all social services and systems. And to build the effective, not only psychological supportive programs, but also all system through all country. We have to be a children-focusing country. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. Ready, set, summer with the Honda Summer Event.

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18:22Honda has all you need to get summer ready for the most fuel-efficient full-line automaker in America. For a limited time, well-qualified buyers can get a 3.99 % APR on a 2026 Accord Hybrid. For more details, visit your Chicagoland Northwest Indiana Honda dealer today. See dealer for financing details. Based on EPA estimate of 2024 large full-line automaker fleet-wide fuel economy. EPA Automotive Trends Report 2025. This is Assignment from Ukraine's Carpathian Mountains. I'm Will Vernon.

18:53The kids are now sitting around a campfire on bright purple mats, all in a big circle. And they're taking it in turns to describe warm memories, pleasant memories from the past. Some of them are talking about performances they've done in front of all their friends. Some of them are talking about their families. One girl said that her warmest memory was when she used to go walking with her father and listen to his stories. She said, that really warms my soul. My dad was across the road.

19:31after he walked up to us he said daughter you're going home with me look what's happening the war has started and by the time that we got home I saw my mom packing things and I also remember sitting in the bomb shelter wearing two hats and a cucumber in my hand.

20:04It was the start of the war, I remember that I wouldn't laugh much. The war took my childhood from me.

20:20The children are now sharing their stories of their memories of when the war started. It really is incredibly emotional. Kids talking about the first time they heard explosions and how their parents were panicking and them having to pack up their things and leave. It really is a very powerful testimony from these children. And then my dad came over to my place, to our home, and started hugging me and crying. And so together we cried with him. And he told me that the Russians are firing rockets at us and shelling us. And he told me that it might be the case that you're not going to see me ever again.

21:11And that said, I'm going to do everything that is possible, that you're going to live a normal life.

21:20That voice at the campfire is Dima. He's 15 years old and comes from the Kharkiv region.