Nikolai Kuleba is the ombudsman for children with the office of the president of Ukraine. This is an extract from his opinion piece in The Guardian: "Daily, parents call me pleading for assistance to evacuate their children, willing to take any risk to find safety. I cannot help them all now. I cannot tell them they are wrong to ask."

As the Russian Army bears down on Ukraine from the north, south and east, a mass migration of millions of civilians is gathering like a storm over the plains. But the international border gates are a painful filter, splitting families apart. The Ukrainian government has mandated that men aged 18 to 60 are not allowed to leave the country, so the crowds pouring into Poland, Hungary and other neighboring nations are eerily devoid of men.

Children who are too sick to go home or flee the capital shelter from Russian missiles in a Kyiv hospital.

Evacuation trains from Ukraine to Poland have become lifelines for women and children forced to evacuate the most hard-hit centres of Ukraine.

“Care” or “foster care” is often depicted as a system that protects children from parents who hurt them. The truth, however, is that the state often removes children from loving families simply because they are poor. Ironically, a system meant to protect children ends up causing them immeasurable harm.

Nothing crystallizes the “her body, my baby” conundrum of surrogacy quite like a war. Should a surrogate be tucked away somewhere safe, to protect the child she’s growing for someone else? Or should she be with her own family, or in her hometown, or even out on the streets defending her nation? That is a live question in Ukraine right now.

KYIV, Ukraine—Krystyna Krayevska came to Kyiv from Poland, where she normally lives and works, for her niece Darynka’s sixth birthday in January. A few days later, Darynka was diagnosed with a brain tumor and, after complications following surgery, now lies on life support in Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, Okhmatdyt.

What has war looked like for the children of Ukraine? For many, it has meant sheltering in basements and subway stations while Russian forces attack cities and street fights rage. For others, it has meant a scramble to escape, leaving homes and fathers, taking trains and buses or walking for miles with their families in hopes of crossing into a safer country.

A slim and chilling new book has ignited a public debate in France on the country's refusal to bring back hundreds of French children who were left in Kurdish camps in Syria.

BARCELONA, Spain — They file into neighboring countries by the hundreds of thousands — refugees from Ukraine clutching children in one arm, belongings in the other. And they're being heartily welcomed, by leaders of countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania.