Save Ukraine

Save Ukraine is a Ukrainian charitable organisation registered in 2014, in the first year of the war in eastern Ukraine. It began with emergency aid and evacuation for families displaced by the annexation of Crimea and the fighting in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and grew from there into work with children, orphans and families caught in the conflict zone.

It describes itself as the only organisation in Ukraine offering a full cycle of support: rescue operations in Russia and the temporarily occupied territories, then long-term rehabilitation, restoration of documents, family reunification and help building a stable life again. Its own summary of that is short — "Where others coordinate — Save Ukraine acts." The organisation was founded by Mykola Kuleba, Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights from 2014 to 2021, who publishes his own record of more than 27 years in child rights protection.

The rescue programme is the part the world knows. Save Ukraine states that more than 19,546 Ukrainian children have been identified as stolen, and it puts that same number down as its goal. Preparing one mission takes over a month — identifying the child, preparing a guardian's documents, legal and psychological support before the journey, then the return itself. The organisation says it documents each deportation for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. As of the site's current count, 1,626 children have been brought back from Russia and the occupied territories.

What happens after the return is the other half. Seven Hope and Healing Centres take in rescued children and families evacuated from the front line, with three to six months of shelter, humanitarian aid, legal help, medical check-ups, schooling and psychological rehabilitation. Alongside them the organisation runs day centres, community centres, modular housing for families who lost their homes, a free hotline for evacuation and rescue requests, and SchoolPack, which sends a fully equipped backpack to a child starting the school year away from home. Its published totals: over 5,000 families sheltered, more than 165,000 people evacuated from frontline areas and over 9,000 children's lives restored through reintegration programmes.

Save Ukraine was UAFest's charity partner in 2024. In October of that year the festival's cheque was presented at a formal ceremony, together with Toby Randell, Mayor of Carleton Place, to Mykola Kuleba.