THE WASHINGTON POST: These teens lost parents to fighting Russia. Ukraine is training them for war.

Viktor is the older one, by two minutes, so he is the one who feels obliged to head most directly to the war that killed his father. He and his twin brother were 12 when Viktor Sr., a Ukrainian infantryman, died on the front lines.

Now 15, Viktor Jr. plans to follow their father’s footsteps into whatever battle with Russia is still raging when the twins finish with this militarized school - not to mention with adolescence and with the awkward, dangerous process of growing into adulthood in a country at war.

Vitalii, 120 seconds younger, plans to go into the State Emergency Service, joining Ukraine’s beleaguered ranks of rescue workers and first responders, not so much to fulfill any family destiny but because, “I like their uniforms.”

Whichever branch they choose, this school puts them into a funnel toward the Ukrainian security services that are desperate for recruits, along with hundreds of other cadets at new government academies devoted to the still-young children of fallen fighters.

The Washington Post was granted rare access to one of the five two-year high schools that the Internal Affairs Ministry has opened for the children of Ukraine’s uniformed dead, missing, captured and disabled. The Post agreed not to name the school or its exact location and to identify students and staff only by first names for safety reasons.

Officially, Ukraine reports that about 55,000 have been killed in the war and about 114,000 are missing. But aid providers says those figures don’t begin to reflect the number of children who have lost at least one parent.

“It’s a tsunami of need,” said Oksana Lebedieva, founder of GEN Ukrainian, a Kyiv-based charity providing psychological support to young people who have lost parents in the war, including to some of the most vulnerable cadets at the government academies.

Ukraine’s military and security services are stretched at every level. National Guard units and some police formations serve in combat roles, while rescue crews and firefighters strain to respond to the demolition of war in dozens of places a day. Ukrainian officials say the military needs to mobilize at least 30,000 people a month just to maintain its current force.

On a recent morning in one classroom, two dozen students sat upright - good posture is a rule - but appeared sleepy after being awakened by five air-raid warnings during the night. Hennadiy, an instructor, briefs children not old enough to shave on the items that every Ukrainian first aid kit needs these days, whether civilian or military.

“Now they are the same, the war has taken away any difference,” Hennadiy said, pulling out the Israeli combat bandages and the rapid-application tourniquets that even kindergarten med kits stock under the endless barrage of ballistic missiles.

Next for this class: Ukrainian history, drone detection, snack, volleyball.

Nationwide, 475 cadets started the academic year last month, although some schools in heavily bombarded areas have switched to remote learning. On this campus, 150 students, 48 of them girls, live on-site and are split evenly across two grades.

Every cadet here has a parent who serves. Roughly half have already lost one. The lyceum, as the 15- and 16-year-old students call it, is part grief counseling, part boot camp.

Its bright corridors are filled not with the standard student body of T-shirts and baggy jeans, but with teens standing ramrod straight in identical dark uniforms - the boys’ hair buzzed to stubble, the girls’ pulled into tight braids. The posters on the wall show police pointing guns into cars, guardsmen with automatic rifles, soldiers with mortars.

In classrooms, they stand with precision whenever an adult enters. Along with math and history, they learn how to dress a sucking chest wound and enter a bombed apartment building. Some of the voices shouting “Glory to Ukraine” at dismissal time are still breaking.

“They are children,” said Lebedieva. “But children recovering from trauma need to be with other children. They need community and structure, and they get that at these schools.”

They also get immersed in the fundamentals of Ukraine’s war-fighting security services: the National Guard, national police, border patrol, rescue teams and firefighters - all hungry for new personnel four years into Russia’s full-scale war.

Whether or not the students go on to formally join one of the branches after their schooling is completely up to them, administrators said.

Oleh, one of the school’s senior staff, points out that cadets are prepared for university entrance exams in their second year, and all are required to complete a degree even if they choose to go into a security service. And any are eligible to join the army as soon as they turn 18.

“There is no pressure on them to join one of our services,” Oleh said.

But most do. More than 60 percent stayed on the service track they started in these classes, the school said. As long as the fighting rages, these survivors of the fallen are on a glide path to war.

Still, whatever their surviving parent might think - and the school declined to make any available for interviews - the families are not making a surprising choice in Ukraine, a nation fully mobilized to repel an existential attack, Lebedieva said.

“It’s not just about family now, it’s about an entire country’s destiny,” she said before going into a classroom of beanbag chairs to lead a group-therapy session. “We can’t even talk about treating PTSD in Ukraine because we’re not ‘post’ anything.”

A champion of modern trauma therapy, Lebedieva said she is often frustrated with the school’s just-get-over-it approach to counselling, a function of Ukraine’s lingering post-Soviet distrust of mental health treatments.

But month by month the school is warming to her touchy-feely therapy sessions and the credentialed psychologists she brings in, she said. And she has marveled as many traumatized children begin to stabilize in a regimen that provides five meals a day, rigid expectations and a shared purpose.

“Many of these kids have lost one parent, and the other one is a mess,” said Lebedieva. “They haven’t been taken care of by anybody. Something is working here.”

For two years, they live a life that is a mix of orphanage, prep school and induction center. Mornings begin with porridge served by a woman the cadets call Mama Ira, who kisses their forehead and feeds some of them by spoon. “No one is losing weight on my watch,” she said as cadets lined up for “second breakfast.”

It’s a schedule as regimented as anything their fallen fathers knew: up at dawn, morning muster, classes, an hour for table tennis or volleyball, homework, only then phones from 5 to 9pm for TikTok and video calls home.

Viktor and Vitalii said they feel the connection to their dad, a truck driver and veteran who went back into the military after Russia invaded in 2022.

“I know he would be proud of us,” Vitalii said during an interview in the school counselor’s office. She handed him a tissue as the brown eyes beneath his black crew cut filled with tears.

His brother, who plans to join the National Guard, looked down. Both have been here a month. They won’t see their mother or be allowed to go home until a cadet “oath ceremony” in October.

A family friend recommended the school, where instruction and boarding are paid by the government. Their mother was pleased when they passed the entrance exam, Viktor said, but was sad to be separated from her only children by a three-hour bus ride. “She’s not doing okay,” he confided.

Their first-year classmate, Uliana, 15, talks to her mother more; long chats every day.

Her mom didn’t want her to enter this school at first, pressing her instead to pursue her championship-level gymnastics. But Uliana is determined to join the national police. She wants to catch bad guys, solve mysteries, find the missing.

Like her father.

The counsellor brings more tissue when Uliana describes the day in 2024 when she called her father at his assault brigade unit to tell him about a gymnastics victory. He had to rush off “for a mission,” he said, but would phone the next morning.

That was the last time his family heard from him. One of his two companions was killed on that mission, but her father and the other were never seen again. His unit sent up drones to search. Uliana and her family scoured the gruesome Russian Telegram channels that showcase the corpses of killed Ukrainians. Nothing.

His name appeared on no lists of dead or captured, just the most tormenting list of all: missing in action.

“Of course, we haven’t given up hope,” Uliana said, her face twisted in pain. “We’re still trying to find him.”

In her room, beside her flawlessly made bed, she keeps a photo of him in his uniform hugging her younger self. There’s a photo of another soldier hugging another child beside her roommate’s bed. Her father is missing, too.

It’s hardest on the children of the missing, Lebedieva said. They rush to read the names of every prisoner exchange. They see the ubiquitous videos of children running into the arms of returning soldiers. They are denied that, and a funeral, too.

“You don’t even get permission to grieve,” Lebedieva said.

Uliana stands with a smile and returns to the corridor where her classmates are mustering for lunch. With a commander barking orders, they turn as one and walk off.

These children are old enough to understand that their loved ones are not coming back from war. And so, with their country cheering them on, they are readying to join them there.

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