Ukrainian girl, 12 years old, who would feel sorry for an animal but is ready to shoot a Russian soldier – report by The Telegraph

The British The Telegraph published a report from a Kyiv school about the Defence of Ukraine classes — a school course where teenagers are taught survival in wartime conditions. The most striking phrase in the material was the words of 12-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl Valeria: she couldn’t kill an animal, but wouldn’t hesitate if she had to shoot a Russian soldier.

This quote sounds heavy. Very heavy.

But even heavier is the question behind it: what must happen to childhood for a child to start speaking the language of war, threat, and survival?

A phrase that cannot be taken out of the context of war

Valeria was 12 years old when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. After more than four years of war, she no longer speaks like a child from a peaceful city, but like a teenager from a country where sirens, shelters, news of the dead, and talks about the front have long become part of everyday life.

That is why her words cannot be read separately from February 24, 2022.

You cannot take one phrase from a schoolgirl, put it in a headline, and pretend it’s about “the hatred of Ukrainian children.” This is too convenient for Russian propaganda and too unfair to the children who did not choose this war.

Valeria does not reason from a safe distance. She grew up in a country that was attacked. For her, a Russian soldier is not an abstract person from an ethics textbook, but a representative of an army that came to Ukrainian land, brought occupation, destruction, funerals, missiles, and fear.

This is the terrifying meaning of her phrase.

It does not show that Ukrainian children have become cruel. It shows that the circumstances in which they have to grow up have become cruel.

An animal is innocent, a soldier of the invading army is a threat

The contrast in Valeria’s words is jarring precisely because it is built on a child’s moral logic. An animal is defenseless and innocent. It is pitiful. Killing it is unimaginable.

But a Russian soldier in her mind is no longer just a “person.” It’s a threat.

A child should not have to draw such a line. In normal life, a teenager should think about school, friends, music, exams, first career choices, trips, the future. Not about whether they could shoot if the war comes very close.

But Ukraine does not live in normal life.

And this is the main nerve of The Telegraph’s story: a school lesson in Kyiv looks like a military training session, but in essence, it is a lesson on how to survive in a country against which Russia is waging war.

What is happening in Ukrainian schools

The Telegraph describes a school in central Kyiv where teenagers undergo an eight-hour session of Defence of Ukraine. The lesson is held once a month. The program includes basic weapon handling skills, first aid, drones, behavior in threat conditions, and countering Russian information warfare.

Teachers in the material emphasize an important point: children are not being prepared to go to war. They are being prepared to survive.

For a country living under attack, this is a painful but understandable logic. If missiles, drones, mines, shelling, and funerals have become part of reality, the school can no longer pretend that the world around remains the same.

In Israel, this is especially understandable. A society that knows what alarms, shelters, terrorist attacks, mobilization, and constant security system work are, understands well the difference between militarism and forced preparation for danger.

That is why NAnovosti — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency views this story not as a sensation about “children with weapons,” but as a painful symptom of the war that Russia has brought into Ukrainian schools.

Not the romance of weapons, but fear of the future

There is an important detail in the report that prevents the material from turning into a flat slogan. Another student, Nikita, says he has known how to handle weapons since childhood because his father took him hunting even before the war.

But then he says the main thing: psychologically, he is not ready to shoot a person. According to him, people cannot truly be ready to shoot other people.

This contrast is very important.

In the same school, in the same shelter, in the same class, two different reactions of teenagers are heard. Valeria talks about being ready to shoot an enemy soldier. Nikita admits that he is not internally ready to shoot a person. Both reactions are human. Both were born from war.

And both show how deeply the Russian invasion has entered the lives of Ukrainian children.

This is not a generation that is “taught to hate.” This is a generation that is forced to understand too early what an enemy, a front, loss, protection, danger, and the cost of a mistake are.

The line between protection and trauma

Here begins the most difficult conversation.

Ukraine is obliged to protect children. And if reality requires teaching teenagers first aid, safety rules, threat recognition, working with drones, and understanding information warfare, the state cannot turn a blind eye to this.

But at the same time, society is already facing another problem: how to later return children to a normal language of life?

Because war changes not only the map, economy, and army. It changes the inner world of a person. Especially a child.

A child growing up under sirens hears the word “safety” differently. A child who sees memorial walls of graduates who died at the front understands the word “future” differently. A child who learns to assemble a weapon in a school shelter no longer lives in the childhood that adults usually promise to protect.

And this is not the fault of Ukrainian children.

This is the price of Russian aggression.

Why you cannot equate Ukraine and Russia

Russian propaganda will surely try to use such quotes as “proof” that Ukraine allegedly raises children in hatred. This is a familiar technique: first come with war, and then accuse the victim of learning to defend itself.

But there is no equality between Ukraine and Russia here.

The Ukrainian school operates in a country that was attacked. Its task is to prepare the child for a real threat, to give them survival skills, to teach them to help the wounded, not to panic, and to understand how enemy information attacks work.

The Russian system, on the contrary, is increasingly drawing children into justifying war, the cult of the army, imperial symbols, and supporting aggression. These are fundamentally different things.

One teenager learns to survive because a foreign army came to his country.

Another teenager is taught to be proud of the army that came to this country.

This difference cannot be erased.

The Israeli view on Ukrainian pain

For the Israeli audience, Valeria’s story does not sound foreign. Israel knows well how quickly children grow up under threat conditions. When alarms, shelters, talks about service, funerals, terrorist attacks, and constant anticipation of a new attack appear in life, childhood becomes different.

But the Ukrainian experience has its scale and its wound. It is about a full-scale war, about cities under attack, about the front, occupation, refugees, missing, dead, and children who have lived inside a historical catastrophe since the age of 12.

Therefore, the question is not whether it is good or bad that Ukrainian schoolchildren study the basics of defense.

The question is why in the 21st century a Ukrainian child should even have to take such lessons.

The answer is known.

Because Russia started the war. Because the Russian army came to Ukraine. Because Ukrainian children had to learn to live where adults could not keep the peace.

Valeria’s phrase should not become a reason for moralizing. She does not need a lecture on humanism from a safe office. Humanism begins not with demanding a child “not to say scary words,” but with demanding the aggressor’s army to leave another country.

When a Ukrainian schoolgirl says she couldn’t kill an animal but is ready to shoot a Russian soldier, it is not an accusation against Ukrainian children.

It is an accusation against war.

And above all — against those who brought this war to Ukrainian cities, schools, families, and children’s minds.

For children to see a soldier not as a threat again, the foreign army must first leave their land.

And then another, longer work will begin — to return to the generation that grew up under sirens a normal sense of life. To return childhood, where a school shelter will once again be just a room in a building, not a place where teenagers learn to hold weapons and talk about the enemy.