Hospitals instead of orphanages: how babies removed from dysfunctional families live in Zaporizhzhia
In wartime Ukraine, not only buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed – deep cracks run through the social systems that for years kept the most vulnerable safe. One of these systems was the institutional guardianship of children in need of protection. In the conditions of active hostilities in Zaporizhzhia, where orphanages were evacuated, and the creation of new ones was prohibited due to proximity to the front, the city’s hospitals became the forced and only possible shelter for children removed from dysfunctional families. This is not an exceptional situation, but a systemic response to the deep crisis in which children without parental care in the front-line areas found themselves.
Hospitals instead of orphanages
After the evacuation of children’s boarding schools and centers for the temporary stay of children, Zaporizhzhia medical institutions became a temporary home for children removed by social services. As of April 2025, there are about 20 children who were left without care in the city’s hospitals. These are babies left in maternity hospitals, as well as children who were taken by the police after being discovered on the streets, or those who ended up under surveillance after citizen complaints about dangerous living conditions.
For in words head of the city service for children, Nataliya Syvorakshi, all these children were removed due to a real threat to their life or health. After the removal, the children are immediately sent to the hospital, where they are examined, documents are drawn up, medical certificates are prepared, and the cases are transferred to the prosecutor’s office and the court to start the procedure of deprivation of parental rights.
Six babies in the neonatal unit
Today, there are six babies in the Department of Neonatal Pathology in Zaporizhzhia. Two of them, aged 8 and 10 months, used to live in the evacuated children’s home “Sonechko”. Another four are very young children, 1.5-2 months old, who were left in the maternity ward immediately after birth.
Doctor Tetyana Kurochkina, head of the department, told, that all babies arrive in a neglected state – dirty, with diapers and signs of neglect. In the department, they are provided with medical assistance, they are examined and all the necessary documents are drawn up for further placement. After granting the status of a child deprived of parental care, these babies can be given up for adoption or placed in family forms of upbringing.
Each of the removed children has its own backstory. Someone was born in conditions of extreme poverty, someone lived on the street, someone suffered from neglect or violence. But after the intervention of social services, they all find themselves in the same system, which, despite the lack of resources and the threat of wartime, tries to give them at least temporary security.
However, this system has strict time limits. As Nataliya Syvoraksha explains, a child’s stay in the hospital cannot last longer than two weeks, because medical facilities are not designed for long-term stays. If the child is sick, he is treated, but after the condition stabilizes, there is a need for urgent placement.
If there are no relatives, acquaintances or temporary guardianship, children are sent to family-type children’s homes or transferred to foster families that provide temporary family support. But here too there are difficulties: at the time of April 2025, there was only one foster family vacant in the city, which could accept only two children. Others have to be transported to other regions of Ukraine, where relevant institutions operate. Due to the proximity to the front in Zaporizhzhia, it is forbidden to create any new institutions for the temporary stay of children. All orphanages were evacuated either to the west of the country or abroad.
The scale of the problem
According to the city service for children, there are about 600 children in need of state protection. Every day, the service works to prevent the removal of new children. But the reality remains harsh: broken families, alcoholism, poverty, parental burnout, unemployment, mental crises, relocations, deportations — all these factors multiply in the postwar environment.
The situation in Zaporizhzhia is a mirror of how the war breaks even those systems that remained afloat until the last. When children are forced to live in hospitals, it means that the state and the community have simultaneously lost security for the smallest. And despite the fact that medical staff, social workers and foster families do their best, every day a child spends in a hospital room is a reminder of a structural failure that needs not only corrections, but also a new philosophy of care.
