Children meeting in the Slovyansk Dream centre where they can socialise and be mentored by elders in Slovyansk, Ukraine. — AFP
A POWERFUL explosion rattled the windows of a community centre in eastern Ukraine, cutting through the silence as a group of teenagers drew at their desks.
“That’s a glide bomb,” Bogdan Masliy, a 15-year-old, said casually without looking up.
Three years into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bogdan can easily distinguish the weapons that have been ripping apart his industrial hometown of Slovyansk.
Sitting in a circle on the floor of the Slovyansk Dream centre where they socialise and mentor younger children, Bogdan and his friends talk about how years of conflict have impacted them.
“We’re not teenagers anymore,” Bogdan said, to nods of sombre agreement.
“I want to feel like a child for a second. It’s impossible now,” added Anna, a 14-year-old from the Donetsk region that the Kremlin claimed to have annexed back in 2022.
Fighting broke out in the town of around 100,000 people in 2014 when Kremlin-backed separatists fomented an uprising in east Ukrainian cities after historic pro-European demonstrations across the country.
Bogdan says he can still remember the separatists and “men in black balaclavas” who controlled his hometown for three months before being routed by the Ukrainian army.
The frozen conflict ground on until February 2022 when Moscow launched its full-scale invasion that has so far killed tens of thousands of people.
Slovyansk has been regularly targeted. Eleven people, including a two-year-old, were killed in a single attack in April 2023.
The years of fighting have upended lives, forced the displacement of millions of Ukrainians and made planning nearly impossible.
“Wake up tomorrow,” was Anna’s response to a question about her hopes for the future.
Bogdan (centre) rehearsing with his rock band in an apartment near Slovyansk. Three years into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bogdan said the music helps him silence his thoughts about the war and his own displacement at the beginning of the war. — AFP
“Because in our country, you don’t know if you’ll wake up tomorrow,” she added.
Sofia, 14, said she hopes to move to the United States to be separated from Russia by “a nice big ocean”.
Now the Russian soldiers are only around 10km from Slovyansk and gradually advancing across the entire front line.
Yevgeniia Alfimova, the 53-year-old founder and director of Slovyansk Dream, regrets the lost childhoods but admires the maturity and freedom of young people compared to her generation that came of age in Soviet times.
“They’re different from us. We can’t cage them,” she said.
Years of fighting have left Slovyansk dotted with blown out buildings and seen an exodus of around half its pre-invasion population.
City authorities say there are still some 5,500 children who attend school online like in other frontline areas.
Bogdan is also taking extracurricular courses in first aid and knife fighting.
“The front is not far away, you have to be ready,” he said.
When time permits he meets with his rock band to rehearse and “let themselves float” through the music.
Their musical aesthetic contrasts with Soviet-style decor of the rented apartment where they rehearse – a style replicated across the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.
Bogdan said the music helps him silence his thoughts about the war and his own displacement at the beginning of the Russian invasion.
He relocated temporarily to the central Vinnytsia region where he said peers called him a “separatist” and beat him up in the street.
Those experiences informed his hopes of becoming a humanitarian capable of explaining his eastern region of Ukraine to people in the rest of the country who have not experienced the same levels of violence.
Bogdan and his friends have been singing more in Ukrainian, mirroring a nationwide trend, in a region where Russian dominates.
He hopes that Ukraine will one day be able to liberate all territory controlled by Russia.
His mother, he explained, wants to leave Slovyansk.
“But I’ve got everything here, my life, my friends,” he said. — AFP
