“War is not just scary, war is very scary. Especially for people with disabilities. When you have limited functioning, even the simplest things, even those related to your safety, become a challenge. Sometimes the air raid alarm can sound several times a day, and if, for example, your child is in a wheelchair, you need to get him/her down from the apartment without an elevator, bring him/her to the shelter in the neighboring building, if there is one, then you have to take her/him down the stairs without an elevator. Or you stay with him/her in the corridor during rocket attacks and pray that the rockets do not hit your house today, because the ‘two walls’ rule may not work one day, and even if it does, you will not be able to run out of the house with your child as quickly as needed. And this problem certainly applies to children’s education. Because even getting physically to a school that used to provide inclusive education for a child is problematic – not all schools have barrier-free shelters, and even if they do, getting a child down there quickly, given the peculiarities of the premises themselves and the fact that most teachers are women and they have to ensure the safety of all students in the class, is a big challenge.”
This is how the grandmother of Mykola, a 7th grader who uses a wheelchair, describes her situation. There are many such challenges for children with special educational needs. In the first days of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, our team at the NGO “Support the Child,” which provides a wide range of services in the field of psychological support for children and adults, faced the fact that war makes children with disabilities extremely vulnerable to challenges and difficulties. During these first days, when many people across Ukraine were stunned, unable to recover from the shock, and unable to make informed decisions, a major problem arose: providing psychological support to children and parents during the processes of evacuation, forced relocation, or staying in the war zone, in shelters and under occupation.
Our specialists began to receive many requests from families, especially parents of children with disabilities, who did not know how to support their children or where to look for relevant information. Parents and educators needed information on what to do, as well as simple materials that could be used anywhere and in the absence of access to most resources (often parents had only some documents and a phone in their backpacks or pockets). Therefore, on February 27, 2022, our team united and began to act. We first tried to provide adults with simple and effective tools for psychological support for children and themselves. On March 15, 2022, our telegram channel “Support the Child,” which currently has 15 thousand subscribers, was endorsed by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, which recommended us to the educational community and published the materials we prepared.
Our psychologists found themselves under an avalanche of questions about support and requests for help from families of children with disabilities. Amidst the shock and chaos of the first weeks, it turned out that society, professional communities, public associations, the education system, and families were completely unprepared to support children and their families in an emergency of this magnitude. Our understanding of the scale of this challenge united our team (educators, psychologists, volunteers) to provide mental health and psychosocial support services (MHPSS) to children, women, families, educators, social workers, and people with disabilities. In particular, “Support the Child” conducts awareness-raising campaigns for families and educators on MHPSS and inclusion, educational webinars, online and offline trainings, psychological counseling and expert consultations, resilience-building classes for children and adults, and research. We also participate in working and expert groups of Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and Science and Ministry of Social Policy, as well as the Education Cluster of Ukraine, a wing of the Global Education Cluster that partners with these Ministries and other international organizations to support Ukraine’s education system. You can learn more about our activities here and here.
The challenges faced by children with disabilities and their families begin with the difficulty of accessing basic needs, security, healthcare, specialized nutrition and access to education. We can only guess how this brutal war will affect millions of Ukrainian children and their physical and mental health in the long term. Based on the experience of previous military conflicts and scientific studies of the past, Ukrainian society is trying to take measures to minimize negative consequences. However, there is currently little information about the impact of emergencies on children with special needs. Therefore, for the third year in a row, our team has been working not only to respond to immediate needs but also to study the impact of the war on the psycho-emotional state of children with disabilities, and to record the dynamics of changes.
War and its aftermath have a serious impact on families and children with disabilities, affecting their present and future. This impact occurs through security, economic, and social factors on families, as well as on the medical, educational and social sectors. The negative impacts can be traced from the highest national level to the level of the individual family, are systemic, and are likely permanent.
There are several types of problems currently facing children with special educational needs in Ukraine.
– Safety and lifesaving. Currently, this is the primary challenge for every citizen of Ukraine, as dozens of civilians are killed by enemy shelling every day. According to information from the Office of the Prosecutor General, more than 1,904 children have suffered in Ukraine as a result of Russia’s full-scale armed aggression.
As of November 19, 2024, according to official information from juvenile prosecutors, 592 children were killed and more than 1,702 wounded, of varying severity. Among the dead is three-year-old Liza with Down syndrome, who died on July 14, 2022, as a result of the Russian army’s rocket fire of the center of Vinnytsia with “Kalibr” missiles. Liza was born in Kyiv, but at the beginning of the full-scale invasion she moved with her mother to Vinnytsia, which is considered a safer region than Kyiv. During the missile strike, the girl and her mother were on their way to a speech therapy session. The lesson was supposed to take place in the Officers’ House. Despite the name, this is not a military facility, but a civilian one. In many cities, there are old buildings with a concert hall that were built in Soviet times and have been so named since then, although they were created and used as cultural facilities. These officers’ houses host concerts, performances, clubs, rehearsals, community meetings, and are used as polling stations. Liza was killed right on the street, and her mother was injured. The missile attacks that day in Vinnytsia killed 27 people, including three children. Kalibr cruise missiles are launched both from unmanned Iskander operational and tactical systems and from boats. These missiles are launched beyond the reach of Ukrainian defense systems, and can fly 400-2,500 kilometers.
– Access to education (online and offline). As of July 2024, the Russian army had destroyed 365 educational institutions, and another 3,798 had been damaged by bombing and shelling. The number is growing every day, which reduces access to education for all children, especially children with special educational needs who find it difficult to attend school remotely.
Not all educational institutions are able to operate offline. Many regions that are under daily shelling, such as all schools in Kharkiv, are engaged exclusively online. Some educational institutions do not have bomb shelters and are forced to work remotely, and in some institutions, shelters are not adapted to the needs of children with disabilities. All this limits the inclusion of children with special educational needs, prevents them from being on equal footing with other students, and limits their socialization. Problems with the availability of electricity further aggravate the situation.
– Additional barriers to online learning. Unfortunately, many children with disabilities are unable to receive quality education in an online format due to their individual characteristics and health problems. For example, our psychologists and teachers support the family of Dmytro, who is in the 7th grade. Dmytro is completely blind and studied at a special school where he received professional support until 2022. His school, which is located in eastern Ukraine, is partially destroyed and is currently under constant shelling. Most of Dmytro’s classmates and teachers have moved to western Ukraine or abroad. The boy’s family was also forced to move to a safer region. Dmytro now attends another school, which is inclusive. Due to his traumatic experience, the boy often has panic attacks and repetitive movements (stimming). Due to his psychological condition, he studies online. However, Dmytro is completely blind, and the online format does not allow him to receive the necessary remedial classes and special teaching methods, most of which are based on multimodal perception. For children with visual impairments, tactile and kinesthetic modes of perception are especially important. These are not possible in online learning contexts. The boy was also virtually excluded from communication with his peers. After a year of work with the multidisciplinary team (work with the mother and her stabilization, work with a psychologist who specializes in helping blind children, visits from a special education teacher to work with the boy at home, and psychiatric consultation), Dmytro’s condition improved, and he began to leave the apartment with his mother and communicate with other people. However, there is still a lot of work to be done.
– Educational losses. According to PISA 2022, Ukrainian students without special educational needs lag behind their OECD peers by about a year and a half in math and science and almost two and a half years in reading.
– Lack of specialists. Many professionals with relevant knowledge and experience working with children with special education needs have left the country or moved to other regions to escape the war. As a result, many children have been left without the necessary professional assistance.
– Limited capacity of the state to provide education during a full-scale war. The Ukrainian state is currently in a very difficult situation, as it is forced to defend itself from Russian aggression on a daily basis. Enormous resources are being used to defend the country, restore critical infrastructure, maintain the economy, and provide critical industries, which reduces the state’s ability to support children with special educational needs. All the steps that are being taken to ensure the functioning of the educational system are being done “on the fly.” People are making decisions in reaction to existing problems and challenges. Experts are looking for strategies, models, technologies, and approaches to provide educational services in extremely difficult conditions, yet these approaches are being tested only after the fact, meaning that the consequences will only become clear with time.
Russia’s current strategy is aimed not only at active actions directly on the battlefield, but also at destroying the infrastructure of non-front-line cities and civilian targets: educational institutions, medical facilities, power plants, and residential buildings, in particular. For instance, on July 8, 2024, a Russian missile strike destroyed the Toxicology Building in Kyiv, where children in need of kidney transplants from all over Ukraine were undergoing treatment. A school that provided educational services to seriously ill children was also damaged. Such actions reduce the access of children with special education needs to medical and social services.
– Psychological trauma. Children with special education needs already face significant difficulties due to their specific conditions, but war and psychological trauma impose additional challenges. Research on the impact of the full-scale war on the psychological state of children with special educational needs is still ongoing, including by the authors of this essay. As long as hostilities and aggression continue, it is impossible to determine exactly how critical these consequences will be for children’s psyche.
For example, the war is psychologically affecting Maria, a 5-year-old girl with a speech impairment who lives with her mother in a small village in Chernihiv region. Their village was under occupation for some time. First they witnessed the cruel treatment of local residents by Russian soldiers, and later the battles for the liberation of the village. Because of this experience, Maria stopped talking altogether, was afraid of any loud sounds, constantly hid under the bed and table, and could not leave the house at all. The girl’s mother turned to our team for help. It took several months of psychologists’ work with the mother and the girl for Maria to start talking and leaving the house again. However, we are aware of the risks of re-traumatization and possible long-term consequences, so we continue to work with the family.
“We are very scared to stay in Ukraine, which suffers from Russian aggression every day. Currently, there is not a single city in Ukraine that is safe. But it is also difficult to travel outside Ukraine with a child with a disability. In a new country, you need to learn a new language, adapt to a new school, find somewhere to live, and for the child it will be additional stress and a setback in the knowledge that we have been gaining in small steps all these years. That’s why we stay and try to somehow make Hanna’s childhood happy,” says the mother of 8-year-old Hanna (a little girl who has autism spectrum disorder, and who believes that her father will definitely return from the front after the Victory).
The war affects the lives of all Ukrainians, but children with disabilities and their families feel this impact more strongly. At the beginning of 2022, neither the state, nor society, nor the families themselves realized the scale of the challenges or were ready to face them. Two and a half years later, the number of problems has not decreased, but they are transforming. So both families and the state are constantly trying to find answers. At the state level, reforms are underway in the education, healthcare, and social sectors. At the societal level, there is a growing number of civic initiatives that support children with special educational needs, and individual families are trying their best to survive and provide their children with a happy childhood as much as possible. “Support the Child” is also part of this movement. We continue to research the impact of war on children with special educational needs, advocate for the rights of children with disabilities at various levels, create and distribute information and educational materials for parents and educators, conduct classes and trainings for adults and children, and provide targeted support to families.
To learn more about the impact of war on the psychological state of Ukrainians, both children and adults, we suggest the following texts:
1) This contribution highlights several aspects of the therapeutic relationship during wartime, including the changes in therapeutic relationship and the therapist’s position, and the circulation of collective guilt.
Dorozhkin, V. (2023). Therapeutic relationships in wartime Ukraine. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 40(4), 247–250. https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000482
2) This comprehensive, comparative study aims to show to what extent the views, assessments, and lives of Ukrainians have changed in various spheres of life during the year of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“How the War Changed Me and the Country: Summary of the Year.” Prepared by Olha Melnyk, Tetiana Skrypchenko, Natalia Khalimonenko, and Veronika Kostenko, under the guidance of the Director of Research of the Rating Lab, Professor Marianna Tkalych and the founder of the Rating Group Ihor Tyshchenko.
3) This article examines the psychological features of the impact of military actions on the emotional-volitional sphere of children with special educational needs, and describes the negative effect on children’s psychological wellbeing.
Kostenko, T., Dovhopola, K., Nabochenko, O., Kurinna, V., & Mykhaylyuk, V. (2022). Psychological well-being of children with special educational needs under martial law. Amazonia Investiga, 11(59), 98-107. https://doi.org/10.34069/AI/2022.59.11.9
4) This article reports on the prevalence of stress, PTSD, and anxiety among adult Ukrainians.
Lushchak, O., Velykodna, M., Bolman, S., Strilbytska, O., Berezovskyi, V., & Storey, K. B. (2024). Prevalence of stress, anxiety, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder among Ukrainians after the first year of Russia invasion: a nationwide cross-sectional study. The Lancet Regional Health – Europe. Vol. 36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanepe.2023.100773
5) This article reports on research that investigated the specificities of mental health of children with special educational needs after 1.5 years of full-scale war in Ukraine.
Nabochenko Olha, Dovhopola Kateryna, Kostenko Tetiana, Stakhova Larisa, Rudenko Liliia, Omelchenko Iryna, Lyakhova Natalia (2024) Mental health of children with special educational needs in the context of long-term crisis challenges: as seen by parents // Wiadomości Lekarskie Medical Advances, VOLUME LXXVII, ISSUE 2, FEBRUARY 2024
DOI: 10.36740/WLek202402114
6) This article describes the role of social support in mitigating the symptoms of PTSD during the war.
Velykodna, M., Charyieva, O., Kvitka, N., Mitchenko, K., Shylo, O., Tkachenko, O. (2024). Living with a friend mediates PTSD and CPTSD symptoms among trauma-exposed Ukrainians during the second year of the 2022 Russian invasion. Mental Health and Social Inclusion. DOI: 10.1108/MHSI-11-2023-0118
7) This article describes changes in inclusive primary education during the war.
Velykodna, M., Deputatov, V., Horbachova, O., Miroshnyk, Z., & Mishaka, N. (2023). Providing Inclusive Primary School Education for Children with Special Educational Needs in Wartime Ukraine: Challenges and Current Solutions. Journal of Intellectual Disability-Diagnosis and Treatment, 11. https://doi.org/10.6000/2292-2598.2023.11.02.5
8) This article describes the impact of the first phase of the war on children and the provision of psychological assistance at schools.
Velykodna, M., Deputatov, V., Kolisnyk, L., Shestopalova, O., Shylo, O. (2023). Psychological Service for Ukrainian School Students during the Russian Invasion: Experience of School Psychologists from Kryvyi Rih. International Journal of Child Health and Nutrition. Volume 12, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.6000/1929-4247.2023.12.01.2
9) This article describes the changing mental health of primary school teachers and how it affected their educational strategies during the war.
Velykodna, M., Mishaka, N., Miroshnyk, Z., & Deputatov, V. (2023). Primary Education in Wartime: How the Russian Invasion Affected Ukrainian Teachers and the Educational Process in Kryvyi Rih. Revista Romaneasca pentru Educatie Multidimensionala, 15(1), 285-309. https://doi.org/10.18662/rrem/15.1/697
10) This article argues that receiving systematic mental health care predicts a better level of psychological well-being.
Velykodna, M., Tkachenko, O., Shylo, O., Mitchenko, K., Miroshnyk, Z., Kvitka, N. and Charyieva, O. (2024). Systematicity of receiving mental health care predicts better subjective well-being of Ukrainians during the second year of the Russian invasion, Mental Health Review Journal. https://doi.org/10.1108/MHRJ-01-2024-0006
Kateryna Dovhopola has a Ph.D. in Psychology and works as Senior Researcher and Head of the NGO “Support the Child.”
Olha Nabochenko has a Ph.D. in Pedagogy and works as the inclusion officer at the NGO “Support the Child.”
Tetiana Kostenko has a Ph.D. in Psychology and is the Head of the NGO “Association of Effective Psychologists of Ukraine.”
Contact information for the team: 22gopd@gmail.com