On International Missing Children’s Day, a powerful art installation at the heart of European politics asks us to look at what we already know — and act on it.
In a bedroom, football shirts hang on the wall, school books sit open on the desk and clothes are discarded on the floor. It’s a room most people are familiar with – the room of an ordinary teenager.
Except the teenager isn’t there. And he may never come back.
Artem’s Room, part of the Empty Beds installation created by Bird of Light Ukraine recreates the bedroom of a composite 13-year-old character, built from verified testimonies of children abducted from occupied Ukraine. It has travelled from New York to Tokyo to the European Parliament in Brussels, where it opened in April 2026 as ministers from 63 countries gathered to discuss how to bring Ukraine’s children home. Beneath the silence, a barely audible hum, punctuated by distant explosions, creates what the artists describe as “a tension in your head, in your chest.”
On International Missing Children’s Day (25 May), this feels the most appropriate place to start.
The true scale of what has been taken
Russia has forcibly transferred an estimated 20,500 Ukrainian children since its full-scale invasion in February 2022. The children have been stripped of their identity, language, and legal status. They have been given Russian passports and placed in adoption systems or indoctrination camps. Ukraine’s own officials put the true total at between 200,000 and 300,000. To date, only around 2,200 have come home.
In March 2026, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russian authorities had committed crimes against humanity, including the deportation and enforced disappearance of children, pursuant to a policy executed at the highest levels of Russian leadership. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova in 2023.
Artem is a fictional child. The children he represents are not.
More than 5.4 million children around the world are separated from their families, locked away in orphanages, even though over 80% of them are not orphans. Orphanages expose children to abuse and trafficking, and physical and psychological trauma that can last a lifetime. Ukraine’s stolen children represent an extreme and criminal intensification of that global reality. But they did not arrive at this moment by accident.
How the room came to be empty
Research by Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab found that most children it was able to trace had been taken from orphanages and residential facilities in occupied regions and funnelled into Russia’s adoption system. These were already among Ukraine’s most vulnerable children, in fixed locations that could not evacuate, with no one to search for them or protect them.
Russia’s machinery of forced adoption found them precisely because an orphanage had already done the work of detachment. The family bond, which is the most powerful protective relationship a child can have, had already been severed before conflict hit. This pattern repeats globally: in Sierra Leone, the DRC, the Central African Republic, armed groups have targeted children in residential facilities for the same reason. Children without a family bond are not simply more vulnerable.
What it takes to keep a room safe
When conflict comes, families can move together. Orphanages cannot. Children inside them lose not just a roof but the person who would search for them, and the person who could carry them to safety.
That is what deinstitutionalisation means in practice: not just closing buildings but replacing them with a loving, protective family, the most powerful way of ensuring children are not captured and transferred, or forcibly recruited into armed groups
Ukraine has understood this, sustaining a commitment to reform through four years of war. Hope and Homes for Children has worked alongside the Ukrainian government for nearly three decades, and we have seen, again and again, that family-based care in emergencies is not a secondary consideration. It is a survival imperative. [Read more about our work in Ukraine →]
Bringing them Back to Family
Getting Ukraine’s stolen children home is a matter of great urgency. Ensuring this can never happen again, in Ukraine or in any conflict-affected country, means dismantling the conditions that made it possible.
Every child brought out of an orphanage and into a family before conflict arrives is a child with a named adult who will search for them. A bond that is harder to break.
That is the work we are committed to.
Watch Bird of Light Ukraine’s Artem’s Room installation and read Hope and Homes for Children CEO Mark Waddington’s full analysis of Russia’s exploitation of Ukraine’s childcare system.
Donate today on International Missing Children’s Day to help us bring more children back to family.
