KHOLODNIY YAR, Ukraine -- Big round glasses magnifying his eyes, “Rocket” stood ramrod-straight along with about 40 other children aged 10 to 13, all dressed in black clothes and identical black baseball caps.
After an instructor inspected the tidiness of their attire, the children put their hands on their hearts and recited what’s known as the Prayer Of A Ukrainian Nationalist.
“Burn all the weakness in my heart with the life-giving fire. May I know no fear or hesitation,” they intoned -- part of an oath written in 1936 by nationalist leader Osyp Mashchak that is now popular among some of the Ukrainian military units fighting against the Russian invasion.
Children declaim the Prayer Of The Ukrainian Nationalist, a patriotic oath that is now popular among some military units in Ukraine.
These assemblies, morning and evening, set the tone for a 10-day “patriotic-nationalistic” youth camp in Kholodniy Yar, an ancient forest fabled among nationalists in Ukraine: Partisans supporting the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic held out here against both Bolsheviks and Whites in the Ukrainian War of Independence just over a century ago.
The Russian invasion has bolstered Ukrainian unity and strengthened the sense of national identity. Amid the onslaught, various forms of military training are becoming part of everyday life for millions of people -- children not excluded.
As many as 73 percent of Ukrainians believe that “military-patriotic education” is advisable in schools, with 16 percent opposed, according to a study on the militarization of society conducted by the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center in May 2024 and supported by USAID.
This shift in popular opinion was expressed by Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, who said in Davos in January 2023: "What [the Russians] have achieved is that all our children will be nationalists."
'Responsible Citizens'
The program of the Call Of The Ravine camp -- "yar" means ravine -- includes sports, lectures on Ukrainian history and nationalist ideology, and activities such as assembling AK-47 rifles, first aid training, and a mine safety workshop.
"Rocket" and a friend attend a workshop on mine safety.
“We don’t want our kids to fight. We’d like them not to have to,” Illya Maryan, the head of the camp, told RFE/RL. “But we want to raise responsible citizens capable of organizing and defending themselves.”
Most of the children at the camp cannot remember a Ukraine fully at peace. They were toddlers when Russia seized Crimea and fomented war in the Donbas region in 2014, and they were around 10 years old when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Children at the camp in Kholodniy Yar learn to assemble AK-47 rifles as well as other military-type skills.
“Rocket,” 13, whose real name is Heorhiy, was attending the camp for the third time. He said he received his nickname -- all campers use them, like Kholodniy Yar partisans had in the past -- when friends threw him into a lake in 2021 and he “flew high in the air like a rocket.”
That summer, he met Pavlo Nakonechniy, an activist and historian who initiated the camp in 2020 and died fighting against the Russian invasion in June 2022 at the age of 25. He left the organization in the hands of close friends, young people mostly from nearby Cherkasy, a sleepy and until recently largely Russian-speaking city on the Dnieper River in central Ukraine.
Children take a 30-kilometer hike in Kholodniy Yar, a picturesque region where pro-independence Ukrainian partisans held out over a century ago.
“I found my place here,” Heorhiy said during a daylong hike in the forest and surrounding hills. His parents recently divorced, and he and his mother moved to a village in another region to live with his stepfather.
He considers himself a nationalist: “It means being faithful to the nation and following its ideas,” he said.
Maryan, who at 23 was the oldest person at the camp, said that while the word “nationalism” might have carried negative connotations for some in Ukraine in the past, it now poses no barrier for parents sending their children there, even if they themselves steer clear of politics and ideology.
Ukraine’s nationalist tradition has been a divisive issue inside and outside the country, with some voicing criticism of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought alongside and against Nazi Germany at different times during the Second World War and is accused of carrying out murderous campaigns against Poles and Jews.
After a session of kayaking, campers and instructors jump up and down chanting “Together to the end” during a summer rain.
As the campers climbed a hill where legend has it that 17th-century Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskiy is buried, Maryan said that his group acknowledges “dark episodes” in the history of Ukrainian nationalism but focuses on its “positive aspects,” “modernizes it,” and “does not preach aggression but readies for self-defense.
“Above all, we are teaching the children the value of discipline, brotherhood, and patriotism,” he said.
Separated By War
For “Oak,” an 11-year-old whose real name is also Heorhiy, the 30-kilometer hike ended with a bloody nose. He carried a military backpack with first-aid and survival kits, a gift from an older friend who is a soldier, like Heorhiy’s father and grandfather.
“The nosebleed is not a big deal,” he said, as instructors helped him.
Children at the camp are required to perform basic duties in their tent town.
Roughly half of the campers have close relatives in the military, and almost all of them have soldiers among broader family or social circles.
“Rocky,” 13, whose real name is Solomia, speaks to her father on the front line every four days and texts him daily. She said she was proud of him and came to the camp following his advice.
She enjoyed patriotic rituals, songs, and poems that are ever-present at the camp, she said, because to her they are “an act of respect toward our heroes.”
Nazar, or “Keba,” 12, hasn’t seen his father, who joined the army shortly after Russia launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, in over six months. They talk every week, but Nazar, who wore military pants and a piece of paper rolled up like a cigarette in his mouth, said he misses his father a lot.
Unlike most of the children, Nazar did not always follow orders from the camp organizers, who leave little room for disobedience or unpunctuality. When he insisted on filling his water bottle despite a request to hurry up, the whole group had to crouch in a plank position while waiting for him. Organizers call it “collective responsibility.”
Separation from parents and fear for their lives can paralyze a child’s development, Volodymyr Voloshyn, the head of the Institute of Psychology of Health, which holds rehabilitation sessions for children of military personnel, told RFE/RL.
“They desperately need social interaction and acceptance, but each individual case requires an individual approach,” Voloshyn said.
The organizers of the camp, most of them high school and university students who themselves participated in Call Of The Ravine camp in their teens, spent an hour every night discussing problems faced by participants and generally addressing their concerns.
According to Kateryna Doroshenko, one of the instructors, for children used to anxious air raids and solitary online schooling, the camp is “a safe haven.”
Maksym, 12, saw the explosion when a Russian missile struck the center of his native city of Vinnytsia in July 2022, killing 20 people. He said his aunt was buried in a mass grave in Mariupol, the Azov Sea port city that Russia occupied after a deadly siege in the spring of 2022.
Children at the Call Of The Ravine camp line up to get their portion of cutlets, potatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers.
He said he collected money to pay his way to the camp, calling Kholodniy Yar a place where “I do what I want.”
Many Ukrainian children experience loss, dislocation, or violence, which results in feelings of isolation, misunderstanding, and powerlessness, Inna Knyazyeva, a psychotherapist at the charitable foundation Voices Of Children, told RFE/RL.
Knyazyeva, who also co-organizes therapeutic camps for children, said that anxious parents often become overprotective in wartime, so children may enjoy clear rules and powerful authority as well as physical activities and adventures.
'In The Trenches'
Children at the camp get all of this in abundance. They wake up around 6 a.m., do morning exercises, and stand in long lines for simple country meals. They are allowed to use their mobile phones for one hour in the evening -- something that 10-year-old Matviy, “Seal,” decried as a “0-out-of-10 experience.”
Discipline is an important part of the camp. Disobedience or unpunctuality is punished with mild physical exercise.
Campers are required to keep discipline and perform basic duties such as washing dishes and cleaning toilets, which have banners reading “Russian restaurant” hung above the pit.
Everybody at the camp must speak in Ukrainian; Russian is allowed only for phone calls with parents.
Illya Maryan, the head of the Call Of The Ravine camp, wears a T-shirt bearing its slogan, “Don’t Whine!”
The camp’s slogan, coined by its founder, Nakonechniy, is: “Don't whine!”
Yuriy Yuzych, the ex-head of the board of Plast, the largest scouting organization in Ukraine and an acquaintance of the late Nakonechniy, described the Call Of The Ravine camp as an "exemplary initiative" that should be replicated “on the state level.”
“The demand for military-patriotic education is huge because every day we see Russians killing us and our children,” he said in the wake of the Russian missile strike on Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt children's hospital. He said that many of his former charges have been killed fighting the invasion.
This summer, some 150 children, aged 10-17, will attend several sessions in Kholodniy Yar, Roman Nadtochiy, 35, the organization’s co-founder who is now serving in the army, told RFE/RL. The organizers dream of transforming the place into an all-year educational center.
Several times during the 10-day camp, a so-called “alarm” was conducted at night. On the third night, after campers chose their nicknames, they were woken up at 2 a.m. to swear an oath vowing to always act in a brave and dignified way, like organizers said Kholodniy Yar’s partisans did.
Participants at the Call Of The Ravine youth camp at a nighttime ritual in which they acquire new nicknames.
As the children knelt, surrounded by torches and mystical music coming from loudspeakers, Maryan, an actor by training, put a replica of a Cossack sword on their shoulders.
Artem, or “Dragon,” 11, said that for him it was “the best part of the camp.” He said he wanted to be a soldier like his grandfather Serhiy, who joined the army at the beginning of the full-scale invasion, at the age of 58 and used “Dragon” as his call sign. Serhiy, who was sent home after suffering two heart attacks, supports Artem and his single mother with the money he receives as a disabled person.
“I think he had to go through something similar in the trenches,” Artem said of his grandfather.