New life, new school: France welcomes Ukraine's refugee children

All refugees from all ethnicities and nationalities are worth the same unprecedented support given to Ukrainians

There were 7.5 million children in Ukraine before Russia launched its invasion of the country on February 24th. Since then, around two million have fled to other EU countries., Qazet.az reports.

As part of their attempt to rebuild their lives in a foreign country many of these Ukrainian refugee children have started going back to school. I went to France to see how these Ukrainian children are adjusting to their new lives abroad.

A lot of people were raped or killed just for fun. If you don't want to see that, or be a part of it, you have to leave.

You wouldn’t expect a teenager quietly sitting at his school desk to say the words just above. But that's exactly what 17-year-old Serhii Horbonos told me when we met.  He arrived in France without his parents. He came as part of a group of 26 Ukrainians, all from Dnipro in Eastern Ukraine. Even though the students were all from the same city they had never met before - since then they have become like a family. 

The goal is not only to teach them French, says the academy's director Jean-Yves Ebel, but also to give them their social life back, to let them live out their adolescent lives.

“One of the missions of education is to give students a place to develop their personality and their well-being."