Ukraine’s Children Are the Peace Plan | Opinion

While the world’s most powerful men debate Ukraine’s future in palaces and over secure phone lines, Ukraine has already written its response underground. Beneath the shelled cities and rutted frontline villages, a quiet revolution is underway: brand-new schools, built below the surface, equipped with state-of-the-art lighting, ventilation, water and food, designed to protect and educate the children Russia has been trying to erase. These are not improvised shelters. They are a declaration. Ukraine is not waiting for diplomacy to catch up with its children’s futures. It is building those futures now, in defiance and at great cost. If you want to understand what Ukraine is fighting for—and what it needs from us—start here. Ukraine’s children are the peace plan.

I’ve been to dozens of villages along Ukraine’s frontlines over the last four years. While talks continue among world leaders, tens of millions of Ukrainians—each living in harm’s way—remain relentless in their resolve to triumph as Ukrainians. UNICEF last week reported that more than one-third of Ukraine’s children remain displaced on the eve of the all-out war’s fourth anniversary—more than 2.5 million children.

Conditions in Ukraine have evolved over my 14 humanitarian trips, from ill-equipped child safe houses in the west to isolated, de-occupied and under-resourced villages in the east. Russia’s continuing broad-scale attacks on residential neighborhoods, medical facilities and utility grids leave these villagers and millions of their urban countrymen in terror, in the dark and cold—UNICEF reports 1,090 Russian attacks on energy infrastructure in 2025 alone.

Yet, in this landscape of horror, Ukrainians are relentlessly committed to a path forward that honors their culture, their history and their future. Because of—or in spite of—high-level talks in faraway palaces, Ukrainians see their future as they did before the war began: free, independent and democratic. A future built by building up their children.

Our aid trucks have traveled more than 1,000,000 miles in the war zone, visiting hundreds of safe houses and remote villages. We feed and care for the innocent children of war. Russia has been ruthless in its attacks on children. UNICEF reports more than 340 educational facilities damaged or destroyed in 2025, and more than 2,800 since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, with verified child casualties running 160 percent higher in 2025 than the year before. Ukraine’s response? Online schools, schools in bomb shelters and the construction of underground schools. We’ve toured these marvels—schools constructed below the surface with state-of-the-art security, lighting, air, water and food supplies to protect and provide for Ukraine’s most precious assets: its kids. These are the images that President Volodymyr Zelensky carries with him as he refines a plan for peace. Ukraine’s children are not a side story. They are the plan.

For our part, our nonprofit Common Man for Ukraine seeks to help Ukraine’s children begin to process what war has taken from them—loved ones and their childhood. Our trauma counseling program welcomes up to 35 children of Ukrainian soldiers killed in action for a 3-week retreat session each month, supported by mental health care professionals. To help them rebuild their lives back home, we now also offer a similar trauma counseling retreat for their widowed mothers.

The need has never been greater, and the resources to meet it have never been thinner. The suspension of U.S. foreign aid last year triggered a 20 percent reduction in humanitarian responders active in Ukraine, with the smallest organizations — the ones most likely to reach the most isolated frontline villages—hit hardest. The gap is real, and it is growing. Private citizens and independent organizations have stepped into it. We intend to keep stepping.

As the sun sets on the fourth year of all-out war, Ukraine has already decided what peace looks like. It looks like a child doing her homework by solar lantern in a bomb shelter. It looks like a classroom built three stories underground, with filtered air and running water and a teacher who showed up anyway. It looks like a child and mother entering into trauma counseling to eye a more hopeful path forward, even as the nightly barrage of attacks inflicts ongoing layers to that trauma. It looks like a country that, even in the middle of a war of annihilation, is betting everything on its next generation. We’ve seen it with our own eyes, on trips across a country that refuses to stop building its future.

You don’t have to wait for a peace deal to invest in that future. You can do it today by supporting an organization like Common Man for Ukraine doing this critical humanitarian work on the ground. The diplomats are working on the terms of peace. Ukraine’s children are working on peace itself. Help make sure they have what they need to get there.

Susan Mathison co-founded the New England-based grassroots nonprofit Common Man for Ukraine in 2022, providing more than 4 million pounds of food to Ukrainian child safe houses and frontline villages, as well as trauma counseling to more than 1,500 children and widows of Ukrainian soldiers killed in the war. Mathison also serves as president of her local Habitat for Humanity chapter and retired after a 30-year career at the USDA Forest Service.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.