Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko announced the launch of a large-scale inspection of all orphanages in Ukraine and simultaneously announced the presentation of three suspicions to employees of the boarding school system. The decision was made after materials published by activists about years of abuse began to reach law enforcement agencies and actively spread online, creating an unprecedented public outcry.
Over the past six months, human rights activists have collected hundreds of documents and publications that demonstrate how the Ukrainian boarding school system has turned into a closed, opaque, and sometimes downright criminal structure. For years, it has covered up child abuse, corruption of state funds, and schemes involving local officials. Now that the first suspicions have been raised, it is clear that the issues raised were systemic, not isolated cases.
One of the most painful episodes was the case in Greater Lublin. After a video of a 12-year-old girl who spoke about sexual harassment by the head of a rehabilitation center appeared on the Internet, it became obvious that this was not a single incident. The children's testimonies were confirmed by many years of beatings, rapes, humiliations and threats. Monitoring revealed conditions that did not meet any standards: lack of basic hygiene products, use of the dining room for private purposes, illegal transactions with the children's money. It was after the public disclosure that law enforcement agencies began to study the activists' materials.
No less resonant was the story of the illegal return of 52 Ukrainian children from Austria, including children with severe disabilities. They had been in safe conditions abroad for three years, but on the night of June 2, 2025, they were secretly delivered to Ukraine, to the Kirovohrad region - a region that regularly comes under rocket fire. Human rights activists have filed dozens of requests to central and regional authorities, seeking explanations about the legitimacy and purpose of this decision, because the fate of the children and the motives of the officials in this story remain unclear.
Another large-scale case concerns the Zaporizhzhia Children's Home "Sonechko". After analyzing financial documents, it became clear that the institution had been receiving funding for years for children who were not actually there. One hundred and seventy-eight children were evacuated to the Lviv region and were fully supported by the local budget, but for state reports they "continued to be" in Zaporizhzhia. This allowed the administration to attract almost 297 million UAH, of which more than 212 million went to salaries and bonuses for employees. Materials about the scheme were sent to three dozen recipients, including central government bodies.
Another area of exposure was the state subvention for housing for orphans. In 2024, the state allocated funds for the purchase of apartments for orphans and support for family forms of upbringing. But on the ground, officials massively reported the “lack of need,” which allowed them to redistribute the subventions in their own interests. Human rights activists sent inquiries to Odessa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv, reaching over sixty recipients and recording the characteristic features of a scheme that worked to covertly redistribute state funds.
The Prosecutor General's statement on the start of an inspection of the entire system of boarding schools looks like the first serious step by the state after a long period of ignoring the problem. At the same time, human rights groups emphasize that a formal inspection will not yield results if the prosecutor's office does not study the collected materials in detail. In half a year of work, public experts managed to create serious precedents, prove the existence of systemic violations and show that the problem can be solved not on paper, but through real actions.
