Overview

• Eight-year-old Andrii and six-year-old Maksym Tupkalenko are the only children left in Kalynove, a frontline village in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.
• They spend hours crawling through trenches and handling unexploded ordnance, turning scrap materials into makeshift forts to ward off drones and glide bombs.
• Their mother, Varvara, moves them between the village and a bombarded Kharkiv apartment whenever attacks intensify, despite both locations facing regular drone swarms.
• Nightly drone assaults and glide-bomb attacks have intensified this summer, leaving trenches and yards littered with shell casings and grenade fragments.
• Save the Children warns that prolonged conflict is creating a ‘lost generation’ of Ukrainian youths deprived of stability, education and normal development.