EDITORIAL: 38,558 violations against children in 2025 — the world broke its promise

Introduction: A record no one wanted

The report that should stop everything

On June 17, 2026, the United Nations published its annual report on Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC). The numbers are a cry in the night: 38,558 grave violations documented against 24,174 children in 2025. This is the absolute record since the mechanism was created 30 years ago. Thirty years of documentation. Thirty years of resolutions. Thirty years of solemn declarations. And the worst tally ever recorded.

This report is not an abstract statistic. Every number is a real child — a boy forcibly recruited into a militia, a girl wounded by a strike on her school, a baby who died of deprivation in a besieged area, a teenager detained and tortured for surviving in the wrong city. 38,558 times, the world failed its promise to protect the most vulnerable. This editorial is an attempt to understand how we got here — and what we must do.

Ukraine at the heart of the toll

The UN CAAC report for 2025 identifies the war in Ukraine as the leading contributor to documented violations. This is no surprise for those who follow the conflict — but seeing this reality confirmed in an official United Nations report should sound like an alarm in every capital that claims to support international humanitarian law. Russia, with its deliberate strikes on Ukrainian civilians, its deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, its attacks on hospitals and schools, is the primary power responsible for this record.

Documenting this is naming responsibility. And naming responsibility, in a world where international justice mechanisms are slow and imperfect, is the first step — necessary even if insufficient — toward accountability.

The documented violations: what the report actually says

The list of crimes against childhood

The UN CAAC report identifies several categories of grave violations. The recruitment and use of child soldiers — boys and girls under 18 forcibly or manipulatively enrolled in armed groups. The killing and maiming of children in combat zones. Attacks on schools and hospitals — infrastructure expressly protected by international humanitarian law. Abductions. The denial of humanitarian access. And conflict-related sexual violence.

In the Ukrainian context, the most documented violations include Russian strikes on schools and medical facilities, the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia — a crime for which the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Russia's Children's Rights Commissioner in 2023 — and civilian deaths resulting from the indiscriminate bombardment of residential areas.

24,174 individually documented children

The figure of 24,174 children is particularly significant. These are not estimates or projections — these are children whose cases were individually documented by UN field teams. Given the difficulties of access in active combat zones and gaps in documentation, this figure represents a minimum — the reality is certainly more severe.

This distinction — individually documented children versus broad estimates — is important for understanding the quality of the UN's work. Each file represents hours of investigation, cross-referencing sources, and verification. This is not humanitarian rhetoric — it is rigorous work conducted under extraordinarily difficult conditions. The respect we owe these humanitarian workers is proportional to the difficulty of their mission.

The war in Ukraine and children: a documented reality

Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure

The war in Ukraine is documented as the leading contributor to violations in the CAAC 2025 report. Russian strikes on Ukrainian cities — documented by ISW, Euromaidan Press, Ukrainska Pravda, and dozens of other organisations — regularly hit residential areas, schools, hospitals, and shelters. Every strike on a civilian-populated area, whether deliberate or not, affects children who live, study, or play in those spaces.

Euromaidan Press on June 22, 2026 reports a particularly devastating example: a Russian strike in the Sumy region that killed three generations of the same family. That image — an entire family wiped out, children included — is not an exception in this conflict. It is the terrible norm of a war in which Russia deliberately and systematically strikes civilian populations.

The deportation of Ukrainian children

One of the most serious crimes of the Ukrainian war, documented and recognised by the international community, is the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. According to Ukrainian estimates and UN data, thousands of children were forcibly taken from occupied Ukrainian territories to Russia — separated from their families, stripped of their national and cultural identity, and placed in Russian foster families or institutions.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Russia's Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova precisely for this crime. This international legal recognition places the deportation of Ukrainian children in the category of war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity. The CAAC 2025 report is part of that evidentiary record.

Ukraine evacuated 500,000 civilians: Zelensky's response

A massive evacuation effort

Faced with Russian strikes and the advances of occupation forces, Ukraine conducted in 2026 a massive evacuation effort: according to Kyiv's figures, more than 500,000 civilians were evacuated from combat zones. These evacuations include entire families with their children, elderly people, hospital patients, and populations of frontline villages who cannot remain safely in place.

This evacuation effort is a concrete demonstration of the Ukrainian state's commitment to protecting its civilian population — including its children — under the most difficult conditions. It stands in direct contrast to Russia's policy of deliberate civilian targeting. When Ukraine evacuates, Russia bombards. This fundamental contrast in doctrine must be central to any analysis of the conflict.

The challenges of evacuation in a combat zone

Evacuating civilians in an active combat zone is extraordinarily difficult. It requires negotiating humanitarian corridors, coordinating transport, ensuring the security of convoys against Russian fire that sometimes targets those very corridors, and caring for traumatised populations leaving their homes and often their loved ones behind. Ukraine is carrying out this titanic effort with limited resources, in a context of total war, and with a consistency that commands admiration.

For evacuated children, the trauma is twofold: that of the war itself, and that of displacement. Leaving one's home, school, friends, and familiar surroundings — even to reach safety — is a real developmental trauma. Psychological support services for displaced children in Ukraine are a necessity that international aid must actively support, not only military equipment.

Gaza in the report: the global context of violations

More than 1,000 Palestinian deaths in 8 months after the ceasefire

The UN CAAC 2025 report is not limited to Ukraine. It documents violations in all active conflicts worldwide. Among them, the conflict between Israel and Gaza also contributes to the toll. According to the British government in its June 2026 bulletin on the situation in Gaza, since the formal ceasefire of October 2025, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in 8 months.

These figures raise serious questions about what a "ceasefire" means. A formal agreement that still leaves more than 1,000 people dead in 8 months is not peace — it is war at reduced intensity. Children among those victims — and there are some — contribute to the global violations tally that the UN documents. The suffering of children in conflicts knows no geopolitical boundary.

The multiplicity of conflicts and their human convergence

The CAAC 2025 report covers more than twenty active conflicts worldwide. Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Yemen — everywhere, children are paying the price for decisions made by armed adults. This multiplicity of crises creates a risk of diluted international attention: when everything is serious, nothing seems like a priority.

But the reality of the 2025 report — 38,558 violations, absolute record — demands that we refuse that dilution. Every conflict deserves attention proportional to the suffering it generates. And among all these conflicts, the war in Ukraine, given its scale, its duration, and the direct responsibility of a permanent nuclear member of the Security Council, deserves entirely particular attention.

International humanitarian law: fine text, tragic reality

The Geneva Conventions and their limits

The Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols form the fundamental corpus of international humanitarian law. They explicitly protect civilians, children, the wounded, and prisoners of war. They prohibit indiscriminate attacks, deliberate attacks on hospitals and schools, and the recruitment of child soldiers. They define war crimes with meticulous legal precision.

The CAAC 2025 report is, implicitly, an indictment of the ineffectiveness of the mechanisms for enforcing this law. The conventions exist. The crimes are documented. Responsibilities are established. But the criminals remain free — Putin has not surrendered to The Hague. The deported children have not all returned home. Bombs continue to fall on Ukrainian cities. International humanitarian law without enforcement mechanisms is a promise victims cannot cash.

The necessary reform of the Security Council

The UN Security Council, paralysed by the veto power of permanent members, is unable to take coercive measures against Russia, which sits on it. This paralysis is a structural flaw in the international architecture that must be reformed. A Security Council where the primary party responsible for documented violations can block any collective response is a Council that has abdicated its fundamental mission.

Security Council reform — expanding its composition, limiting the right of veto in cases of war crimes and crimes against humanity — is a priority that world democracies must pursue with determination. It is not an easy mission — major powers do not willingly surrender their privileges. But a system where the perpetrators of crimes against children sit in judgment on the principal body meant to prevent them is morally unsustainable.

Ukrainian children: a generation shaped by war

The long-term impact on child development

Ukrainian children who have been growing up since 2022 — some since 2014 — under the constant threat of Russian bombs, with fathers and brothers at the front, with homes destroyed and cities evacuated, are developing deep psychological traumas that will mark their generation for decades. Research in developmental psychology is clear: war traumas experienced in childhood have lasting effects on cognitive, emotional, and social development.

This does not mean these children are condemned. Resilience factors — the presence of stable adults, the maintenance of school routines, access to psychological care, community cohesion — can significantly mitigate the impact of trauma. And Ukrainians have demonstrated extraordinary collective resilience. But massive investment in the mental health of Ukrainian children after the war will be needed for this generation to rebuild their lives fully.

The right to education under the bombs

Ukraine has maintained, at great effort, a functioning educational system despite the war. Online classes, underground shelter-schools, relocated institutions — all these adaptations bear witness to Ukraine's determination to preserve education as a fundamental right even under the most adverse conditions. Thousands of teachers continue to teach during air raid alerts, sometimes from their own basements.

This persistence in education is both a practical necessity — a generation without education will be a generation that struggles to rebuild — and a political statement: Ukraine refuses to let the war steal its children's future. Every child who keeps learning despite the bombs is a victory against Putin.

The international humanitarian response: insufficient but necessary

What humanitarian organisations are doing

Hundreds of humanitarian organisations — UNICEF, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, the Red Cross, dozens of Ukrainian and international NGOs — are working in Ukraine and other conflict zones to respond to the violations documented by the CAAC report. Their work includes emergency medical care, food aid, psychological support for traumatised children, reuniting separated families, and documenting violations for international justice mechanisms.

This work is indispensable — but it is by its nature curative, not preventive. Humanitarian workers treat the wounds that war inflicts; they cannot stop the war itself. Preventing the violations documented in the CAAC report requires ending the conflicts — and in particular the defeat of Russian aggression in Ukraine, which contributes the largest share of these violations.

Humanitarian funding in crisis

Humanitarian appeals for Ukraine and other crises are chronically underfunded. Government donors — fatigued by the duration of crises, under domestic budgetary pressure — reduce their contributions over time. This reduction in humanitarian funding creates gaps in the protection of the most vulnerable children — those whose families could not be evacuated, who live in grey zones between front lines, or whose psychological needs are not covered by emergency aid.

The record of 38,558 violations in 2025 must be a wake-up call for international donors. This is not the moment to cut humanitarian funding — it is the moment to increase it, make it more flexible, and direct it as a priority toward the most affected populations. Lasting peace is also built by healing the wounds of war, not only by stopping the fighting.

The deportation of Ukrainian children: a crime that demands a response

The ICC arrest warrants and their reach

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova for the war crime of unlawful deportation of children. These are the first arrest warrants ever issued against a sitting head of state of a nuclear power. Their practical reach is limited — Russia has not adhered to the Rome Statute and will not extradite its nationals. But their symbolic and political reach is considerable.

These warrants mean that Putin can no longer travel to the 124 ICC member states without risking arrest. They permanently mark his regime with the stamp of war crime in the archives of international law. And they set a precedent: the deliberate targeting of children in armed conflict — their deportation, their deprivation of national identity — is recognised as a crime deserving the highest available international sanction.

The return of Ukrainian children: an unfinished mission

Ukraine has embarked on the complex mission of locating and repatriating deported children. Hundreds have been brought back through diplomatic operations involving intermediaries, prisoner exchanges, and international pressure. But thousands of others remain in Russia — their traces lost in a Russian administrative system that has often renamed them, had them adopted by Russian families, or placed them in boarding schools far from Ukraine.

This repatriation work must be a post-war priority. Ukraine, with the support of international institutions, will need to build a comprehensive system for identifying, locating, and safely repatriating deported children. This is a moral, legal, and national obligation that the international community must support financially and institutionally. Every child brought home is a victory over war crime.

What the world must do

A five-point agenda to protect children in conflicts

Faced with the catastrophic record of 38,558 violations, this editorial proposes a five-point agenda. First point: resolutely support Ukraine in its defence against Russian aggression — because this is the conflict that contributes most to documented violations, and only a victorious Ukrainian resistance can end them. Second point: increase humanitarian funding for children in crisis in all active conflicts, refusing donor fatigue.

Third point: reform the Security Council to eliminate or limit the veto in situations of war crimes against civilians. Fourth point: strengthen ICC resources and international justice mechanisms to accelerate prosecutions of those responsible. Fifth point: invest massively in the mental health and education of children affected by conflicts — in Ukraine and elsewhere — because the invisible wounds of war are just as real as physical ones.

Ukraine as the absolute priority of this agenda

Within this five-point agenda, Ukraine occupies a particular place. Not because Ukrainian children suffer more than Yemeni, Sudanese, or Congolese children. But because the Russian aggression against Ukraine is the only crisis where stopping the violations is directly linked to the capacity of a democracy to defend itself against a nuclear power. Supporting Ukraine is a direct contribution to reducing the global violations tally documented by the UN.

For every additional Patriot missile delivered to Ukraine, for every artillery piece, for every drone — that is a Ukrainian city that Russian Shahed drones may not be able to strike that night. A city with children who might sleep in their beds rather than in a shelter. Military aid to Ukraine is humanitarian aid to its children. The two are inseparable.

The Boston Globe and the Donbas exodus

The faces of flight

The Boston Globe on June 22, 2026 reports the ongoing exodus of populations from the Donbas fleeing the cities Putin covets. These reports — which give faces, names, and stories to the statistical exodus — are essential for understanding the human dimension of the conflict. Families loading their cars with a few belongings, elderly people leaving their homes for the first time in decades, children looking out the window at what they may never see again.

These images are not passive victims — they are active survivors who make the choice of life against the risk of staying in besieged cities. That choice — often made in haste, under air raid alerts, with no certainty about the destination — is one of the most courageous forms of ordinary resistance in this conflict. Fleeing war to survive is also a form of refusal of Putin's destructive will.

Hosting the displaced in Ukraine and Europe

The roughly 7 million Ukrainian refugees hosted in European countries since 2022 represent the largest movement of refugees in Europe since the Second World War. Among them, a significant proportion are children — many of whom have lost months or even years of normal schooling in the disruption of displacement. Host countries have made a remarkable integration effort — but integrating millions of children into foreign school systems, in foreign languages, with untreated traumas, is a long-term challenge.

Displaced children — in Ukraine and abroad — are the least visible but most affected participants in this conflict. The attention we give them — funding their schools, their psychological support, their social reintegration — is the most concrete test of our real solidarity with Ukraine.

The responsibility of the media and the public

Not growing tired of watching children

One of the most serious risks in covering prolonged conflicts is the normalisation of children's suffering. After months, then years, of reporting on injured children, displaced families, bombed maternity wards — the public can develop a form of protective insensitivity that turns what should be horror into accepted background noise. This normalisation is the best ally of those who commit these violations — it renders them invisible.

The media have a responsibility to keep outrage alive in the face of violations against children. Not through emotional manipulation — but through rigorous, human reporting that restores to statistics their concrete dimension. The 38,558 violations cannot remain a number in a press release. Each one is a story, a face, a family. Media that accept this responsibility are exercising their most fundamental democratic role.

Citizen engagement as a response

Beyond the media, ordinary citizens can act. Financially supporting organisations that help Ukrainian children — UNICEF, Save the Children, Ukrainian NGOs such as Voices of Children. Political pressure on governments to maintain aid to Ukraine and increase humanitarian funding. Rejection of Russian propaganda that dehumanises Ukrainian victims. And simply staying informed, staying attentive, staying outraged at numbers that should keep us up at night.

The record of 38,558 violations in 2025 is a collective shame. It is the result of decisions made by armed men in palaces and bunkers. But it is also the result of the inadequate responses of the men and women who govern democracies, and of all of us who watch without always acting. This tally belongs to all of us — and it is up to all of us to decide it will not be repeated.

The future we choose for these children

A just peace as the only durable answer

This editorial is not a plea for peace at any price. A peace that leaves Russia in possession of the Ukrainian territories it conquered, that validates its policy of child deportation, that provides no guarantee of Ukraine's security against future aggression — that is not peace. That is a capitulation preparing the next war.

A just peace — one that deserves the name — is one that restores Ukraine's territorial integrity, ensures justice for war crimes, guarantees future security through integration into collective structures such as NATO and the EU, and creates the conditions for a reconstruction that gives Ukrainian children the future that was stolen from them. That is the peace worth fighting for — not an armistice that freezes injustice in place.

38,558: the number that must change the world

The UN CAAC 2025 report bears the title: Children and Armed Conflict. That juxtaposition — the innocence of childhood and the brutality of armed conflict — is the fundamental contradiction that every generation must resolve. We have not yet resolved it. The figure of 38,558 violations in 2025 proves that we have not yet resolved it.

But the hope — and this editorial wants to end on hope — is that thousands of humanitarian workers, Ukrainian teachers in underground shelters, soldiers defending their families, diplomats negotiating tirelessly, journalists documenting, citizens who remain engaged — all these people refuse to let 38,558 be the final word. Hope is not naivety. It is a decision. And that decision, I make it every day this war continues.

The responsibility of states in protecting children at war

The obligations of international humanitarian law

International humanitarian law — the Geneva Conventions, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Additional Protocols — is explicit about the protection owed to children in times of conflict. Deliberate attacks on civilian populations, the forcible transfer of children from an occupied country to the occupying country, the forcible recruitment of minors into the armed forces — all of this is prohibited by an international legal corpus that Russia has signed and ratified.

The UN report this editorial comments on does nothing more than document the systematic violation of these obligations. This is not a surprise — Russian violations of humanitarian law have been documented since the beginning of the large-scale invasion in 2022. What is new is the scale of documentation: thousands of verified cases, patterns consistent with a deliberate strategy rather than isolated incidents. Russia is not making mistakes — it is implementing a policy.

The responsibility of third-party states and international organisations

When a state violates international law in this way, responsibility does not stop at its borders. Third-party states that maintain normal commercial relations with Russia, that accept its representatives in international forums, that refuse to execute the International Criminal Court's arrest warrants — these states become accessories by omission. The international community cannot simultaneously affirm that international law applies and ignore its most serious violations.

International organisations — the UN, Council of Europe, OSCE — have their own responsibility. When their reports document atrocities and their enforcement mechanisms remain blocked by vetoes or impossible consensus, they must find alternative paths. Coordinated diplomatic pressure, coalitions of like-minded countries, bilateral mechanisms of universal jurisdiction — all of this must be mobilised to ensure that those responsible for crimes against Ukrainian children are held to account.

Conclusion: Childhood, the last horizon of justice

What 38,558 tells us about ourselves

The figure of 38,558 documented violations in 2025 does not only say something about the brutality of armed conflicts. It says something about us — about the nations, institutions, and individuals who allowed these conflicts to unfold and escalate. It says our prevention mechanisms are insufficient. That our humanitarian funding is inadequate. That our political will to confront aggressors is too often timid. That the protection of children in conflict remains an unkept promise.

But this number also speaks to the scale of the work accomplished by those who documented these 24,174 children individually — each case, each violation, each circumstance. This work of documentation is itself a form of resistance, the resistance of truth against forgetting. As long as we document, we recognise. And as long as we recognise, there remains hope that those responsible will be held to account.

Ukraine: symbol and real case

Ukraine is both a symbol in this report and a real case. A symbol because its resistance to Russian aggression is the most visible demonstration that a democracy can and must defend itself. A real case because its children — those sleeping in shelters, those who were deported, those learning maths under sirens, those whose families were wiped out — are recorded in the CAAC 2025 report with their individual stories.

Supporting Ukraine is making that number of 38,558 go down. It is as simple and as vertiginous as that. Every Ukrainian victory means one fewer child in next year's report. Every abandonment of Ukraine means one more. That moral equation should guide every political decision that concerns this conflict.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency box

Editorial positioning

This editorial is written by Maxime Marquette, columnist and analyst. It represents an opinion and a position — that is the very nature of an editorial. I am pro-Ukrainian and I consider that Russian aggression is primarily responsible for the record violations documented in 2025. This position is supported by the data cited in the sources below. I am not a representative of an NGO nor an employee of the UN — these opinions are mine alone.

Limitations and caveats

The UN CAAC 2025 report covers many conflicts beyond Ukraine. This analysis focuses on Ukraine because of its predominant documented role in the report — without minimising the suffering of children in other conflicts. The figures cited are those from the Peace Humanity publication of June 22, 2026, based on the UN report of June 17, 2026.

Sources

Primary sources

Peace Humanity — UN CAAC Report 2025: 38,558 violations, 24,174 children — June 22, 2026

GOV.UK — Gaza bulletin June 2026, 1,000 deaths in 8 months post-ceasefire — June 22, 2026

Secondary sources

Euromaidan Press — Russia strikes northern Ukraine, kills three generations of Sumy family — June 22, 2026

Boston Globe — Mass exodus from Donbas, populations flee Putin's bombs — June 22, 2026

ISW — Russian strikes on civilians documented — June 22, 2026

Ukrainska Pravda — Ukrainian civilians killed — June 23, 2026