Veronika is in her final year of high school at a school in her hometown of Zlatopil. Due to the war, she has been separated from her class.
Nowadays, she has gotten used to having lessons online, even though she misses her classmates.
Veronika was twelve years old when Russia's full-scale invasion began on February 24, 2022. Two years ago, she lost her father, who was killed in the fighting.
He believed in me. Now I have to find that strength on my own, she tells TT in an interview provided by the UN children's fund UNICEF.
Thousands of children killed
The war has led to nearly 2.6 million Ukrainian children being displaced from their homes, according to UNICEF. 791,000 are internally displaced and around 1.8 million are refugees in other countries.
More than 3,200 children in Ukraine have been killed or injured in the war. In addition, 1,700 schools have been damaged or destroyed, meaning that one in three children cannot attend school full-time.
Russia's widespread attacks on Ukraine's electricity supply and thermal power plants have had serious consequences during the country's freezing winter. Millions of children and families are forced to live without heat, electricity or water, posing particular risks to young children.
Multiple attacks
Power outages are also noticeable in Zlatopil, and affect Veronika's schooling. When there is a power outage, she cannot attend classes.
Air raid alarms often echo in the city and on one occasion a drone crashed near her house.
I was lucky to be on vacation at the time, so I wasn't at home, says Veronika.
She calls Zlatopil a lucky town, as it was spared the worst of the Russian bombing. But the town has been attacked several times and she often sees missiles in the air from her window.
The missiles are usually aimed at Kharkiv. If you go there you hear many explosions.
The ongoing peace talks with the US as mediator have so far been fruitless. Veronika finds it difficult to judge the negotiations, but no matter how they go, she will never get her father back.
I lost the most important person in my life. It changed me as a person. Now I take greater responsibility for my actions.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine, after first annexing the Crimean peninsula in 2014. In the early morning of February 24, air raid sirens sounded in several parts of the country, including the capital Kyiv and Lviv, as Russian forces entered the country from the north, east, and south.
Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Ukraine in a televised speech to lay down its weapons and threatened to use nuclear weapons if other countries intervened.
Russian forces never reached Kyiv but advanced along the southern coast to Crimea. The coastal city of Mariupol fell after a long and bloody siege.
Ukraine carried out two counteroffensives in the fall of 2022, retaking the Kharkiv region in the northeast and the city of Kherson and its surroundings in the south. In connection with this, Russia announced that it would annex the only partially occupied regions of Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia.
A major Ukrainian counteroffensive was launched in the summer of 2023, but failed to break through the then-fortified Russian defenses. In August 2024, Ukrainian forces entered Russia and occupied part of the Kursk region.
Russia has regularly attacked locations across Ukraine with missiles and drones. The UN has confirmed that over 15,000 civilians have been killed in the war, but the true toll is believed to be much higher. Several million Ukrainians have fled abroad.
Four years later, the invasion is still ongoing, with bloody fighting along the front lines and daily Russian attacks on civilian Ukrainian targets.
