Children and young people that are forced to cross borders to flee war often struggle with extended vulnerability. Their journeys to find safety are a series of fragile steps: through borders, temporary housing, unfamiliar legal systems, and decisions no child should have to make alone.
It is these children’s reality that shaped the heart of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND)’s Regional Workshop for Project Suzir’ya, held in Warsaw in November 2025 . With the generous support of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, KIND brought together 43 child protection professionals from Ukraine and across the European Union, including lawyers, psychologists, social workers, civil society leaders, child trafficking experts, and consular services, to better understand the ways in which these sectors can work together to protect children who fled Ukraine and are living in precarious situations in Europe.
Together, we worked through two urgent questions: what does it take to protect a child from Ukraine when their needs, risks, and rights cross multiple borders? And what happens when the systems that are meant to protect them do not connect with one another?
Why this workshop mattered
As the full-scale invasion approaches its four-year anniversary, the context for children and youth displaced from Ukraine is changing. Political attention is shifting, public discourse is hardening, and resources are contracting across the region. At the same time, the legal and policy framework that has underpinned protection in the European Union is approaching a critical juncture: the EU Temporary Protection Directive is set to expire in 2027, leaving the future status of millions of Ukrainians uncertain.
For children and young people, this uncertainty is not abstract. Their lives often span multiple jurisdictions, legal frameworks, service systems and protection mechanisms, exactly when institutional capacity is under strain.
Project Suzir’ya exists so that KIND and our partners can respond to a difficult reality: children displaced from Ukraine are increasingly navigating complex, cross-border risks and their protection depend on coordination that cannot stop at a national boundary.
What KIND set out to achieve
The workshop had three objectives:
- Strengthen transnational child protection case management. We explored what it meant to support a child when their case spans multiple countries, and when responsibilities are fragmented across institutions.
- Identify protection gaps and promising practices across Europe. We mapped where legal, psychosocial, and procedural safeguards break down in real-world cross-border scenarios, and what actually works when systems are under pressure.
- Build a shared understanding and collaboration across disciplines. Preventing child protection risks like trafficking cannot sit only with police. Trauma-informed care cannot be the sole responsibility of psychologists. Legal safeguards cannot only sit with lawyers. The workshop worked to bring these perspectives together.
To keep our discussions child-centered, the workshop was built around a fictional case grounded in frontline realities: Anna, a 17-year-old girl from Mariupol, navigating her displacement journey across Europe. Through Anna’s eyes, participants examined risks, decision points, and moments where protection succeeded or failed , while exchanging lessons, good practices, and ideas for strengthening cross-border case management.
Key insights: what we found.
Across five technical sessions, one message came through consistently: we will all encounter a child like Anna in our work and the systems meant to protect Anna are not yet built for the reality she is living. We also found that:
- Risks start early and build up over time. Participants highlighted that protection concerns often begin long before exploitation is visible—through unstable housing, isolation, legal uncertainty, online risks, and unresolved trauma that compound across borders.
- Exploitation can be hidden and difficult to identify if services do not work together. Anna’s case showed how trafficking and labour exploitation can be disguised as work or opportunity, especially when children are under pressure to meet basic needs and do not recognise warning signs.
- We agreed that rapid, child-centred intervention requires clear referral pathways, immediate safety and health support, swift access to guardianship and legal representation, and coordinated cross-border information sharing.
- When children choose to share their experiences of the war, for instance in accountability processes, the systems for them to do so must be trauma-informed, child-friendly, and supported by strong safeguards to prevent re-traumatisation and repeated questioning.
- And finally, best interests decisions get harder over time. As displacement becomes prolonged, choices about stability, education, legal status, and family connection become more complex—especially for adolescents trying to build a future while systems remain uncertain.
What happens next: our focus in 2026
The regional workshop did more than identify gaps. It helped define what stronger, more coordinated protection could look like in practice, when cooperation, information sharing, and child-centred decision-making are treated as structural requirements, not aspirational values.
As Project Suzir’ya progresses in 2026, KIND is focused on turning lessons into action:
- strengthening cross-border collaboration that follows the child, not the jurisdiction;
- supporting multidisciplinary pathways that connect legal protection, psychosocial care, and safeguarding practice;
- amplifying child-friendly information and prevention efforts so children understand rights and risks before harm occurs;
- building momentum for systems that do not depend on individual motivation, but on shared responsibility.
Protection is not one service, one document, or one moment of intervention. Protection is a system, and together, we are committed to building one that is capable of holding every child’s journey with dignity, safety, and hope. Through the Suzir’ya project, KIND and our partners continue to provide child-centered, evidence-based and trauma informed support to unaccompanied and separated children and youth.
