According to the official data, more than 25.6 thousand children stay in children’s boarding schools 24/7, while only less than five thousand of them are actual orphans or children, deprived of parental care. All the rest have biological parents and mainly need social support, not isolation in orphanages. However, these children are needed by these very boarding schools, which receive their annual financing depending on the number of their students.
Last year, the Ukrainian government spent almost UAH 11.6 billion on the work of over seven hundred children’s boarding schools, i.e. the expenses per child were about UAH 37.7 thousand a month. There is no doubt that this amount is sufficient to ensure good education and quality health care and cover basic needs. Yet, in fact, 90% of this money does not get to the children but is spent on communal services and personnel’s salaries.
Vira’s story
12-year-old Vira the name is changed has lived in a boarding school in the Lviv region almost since birth. One summer evening in 2024, she decided to record a video in which she talked about being sexually harassed by the director of the institution. At that time, she lived in an education and rehabilitation centre for children with developmental disorders in Velykyi Liubin. For the past 20 years, it has been headed by 64-year-old Stepan Mashchak, a teacher with many years of experience and three children of his own. In the girl’s words, he forced her to kiss and watched her take a shower.
The volunteers, taking care of the children in this institution, received this video and sent it to the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights at the Verkhovna Rada. The following day, the monitoring group came to Velykyi Liubin unannounced. A few days later, a completely unknown boarding school became a symbol of child abuse.
A reaction to the video
The monitoring group came to Velykyi Liubin on the morning of September 27. In addition to the representatives of the Commissioner for Human Rights, the group included representatives of non-governmental organizations and psychologists.
“Our purpose was not to come and find any violations; we wanted to react to the child’s appeal. Yet, the things we have seen are either a verdict to the system of children’s protection or the possibility to change it,” said Kyrylo Nevdokha, the head of the Office for Children and Adolescents, “DIiMO”, at the Ministry of Social Policy and a member of the monitoring group which visited the boarding school.
This specialized boarding school accepts the most vulnerable categories of children: full orphans, children deprived of parental care, or children with specific educational needs. Some students live at the boarding school, and others come to their studies every day. At the time of the inspection, there were 57 children.
“I lived at a boarding school from my birth till the age of 16, but more than nine years have passed since that time. It is sad to admit that the infringement of children’s rights at institutionalized facilities of care and education remains the same, year on year. For instance, there is no free access to toilet tissue. Children are to go to the teacher and ask for it,” Kyrylo Nevdokha said.
The administration of the specialized school claims that teachers have to hide toilet tissue because children either eat or destroy it.
However, Kyrylo was shocked the most when children were telling about the pressure and insults from the institution’s management. One minor girl said that she had been called a “prostitute”, a “beast”, a “scumbag”, “useless”. In addition, children told that they lacked food and were beaten with a ruler or slippers for bad behaviour.
“We registered the children’s testimonies about the director’s sexual harassment of the girls in the institution, his humiliating them publicly and threatening to beat and place them into the psychiatric hospital for “poor behaviour” or violating the schedule,” said Dmytro Lubinets, the Commissioner for Human Rights, on the day following the visit of the monitoring group.
He didn’t give the details of the revealed violations but, according to the NGL.media’s information, the female students complained that the director of the institution allegedly got into their beds, touched their private parts, and forced them for kisses.
Seven children who testified about abuse and harassment left the specialized school on the same day — they were transferred to “Ridni”, the Lviv’s Centre of social support for children and families. Several weeks later, five of them were placed into family-based foster care. Vira, the girl who told her story in the video, is one of them.
“Imagine, before that, they have been living at a boarding school for years and told that there were no families for them. And here, the families have been found for them in a matter of days,” Kyrylo Nevdokha says.
Yulia Fliak, a Greek Catholic nun, who directs “Ridni”, the municipal Centre of social support for children and families, says that now children are safe and psychologists are working with them.
“I will not give any more details to not harm the children’s future. They read the news, they follow this story,” the nun said to NGL.media.
Another girl, taken from the school, is pregnant. The nuns of a Roman Catholic monastery in Lviv agreed to take her in.
Gradually, other children are transferred to other institutions as well. As of March 2025, only about 20 out of 57 children still remained in the Velykyi Liubin boarding school.
Investigation of sexual violence
A criminal investigation of sexual violence regarding children was initiated immediately. Oleh Ivanov, the lawyer of YurFem, the Ukrainian Women Lawyers Association, representing the rights of the children who suffered in that boarding school, says that the investigation of cases of physical and probable sexual violence regarding children may take years because each episode requires consideration and evidence. The investigators have already interrogated a total of more than 60 people.
“We are working with five victims, aged 12 to 17, four girls and one boy. The documents that had to be extracted during the investigation have already been received, and the investigative actions are going on,” Oleh Ivanov says.
According to the information, received by NGL.media, the investigation found cases of sexual violence among children. One of the students of the boarding school said that an older boy had raped him in a school toilet. After that, both children continued their studies at the same school.
It is also known from the court rulings, published in the state register, that in addition to violence, children complained that their banking cards, to which social payments were accrued, were removed from them. In their words, Stepan Mashchak, the director, promised to buy them mobile phones with the money, accumulated on their cards, but he has not done it.
After the monitoring visit, a video was posted on social networks, in which Svitlana Podusivska, a teacher at the Velykyi Liubin boarding school, was cruelly beating a girl with a ruler. In November, she was sentenced to 100 hours of public work with the subsequent prohibition to work with children for one year. Actually, as per the children, she is not the only teacher who was beating students, but we will come back to this practice later.
Punishment with a psychiatric hospital
In his post, Dmytro Lubinets also claimed that children were threatened with the psychiatric hospital for bad behaviour. However, it turned out much worse — those were not mere threats but practice for many years. The students were regularly sent to the Lviv psychiatric hospital for several weeks of “rehabilitation”.
NGL.media managed to talk to one boarding school graduate who agreed to tell some details about the use of punitive medicine.
Nastia Vanio spent a total of four years at Velykyi Liubin education and rehabilitation centre, which she entered in 2017 after the dissolution of the Chervonohrad boarding school.
“I was transferred to a temporary asylum, and Stepan Mashchak and a physical training teacher came to it and suggested that I go to them, to Velykyi Liubin. In this asylum, we were not allowed to use a phone and go to the shop, and Stepan Yosypovych said that it was allowed in his boarding school, so I agreed to go,” Nastia says.
Stepan Mashchak, a former director of Velykyi Liubin education and rehabilitation centre (on the left), Zoriana Shturyn, a teacher, and Orest Solokha, currently the acting head of the boarding school
Once in the boarding school, Nastia noticed the strange attitude of the director to his students. Stepan Mashchak conducted lessons in chemistry and information technologies, and he constantly told them what would happen after their leaving the boarding school. For instance, he used to say, “You will be prostitutes” and tell about some girls-graduates who had allegedly had sexual relations with some unknown boys in exchange for money and had been found dead a few days later.
In Nastia’s words, during the meetings with teachers, the director encouraged them to beat children with pointers or rulers for bad behaviour. Other students of the boarding school told about regular beating as well.
But it was not the worst punishment. It was found that for bad behaviour, children were taken to Lviv, to the regional psychiatric hospital. “Nobody liked to go there. I was there about five times, for bad behaviour each time,” Nastia Vanio said to NGL.media.
Any misdemeanor could become a reason for such punishment. One day, Nastia saw a cat on a tree and decided to feed it. “It got attached to me, and I took it to the boarding school. The teacher warned me that I could be sent to the lunatic asylum for that. Still, I was not afraid, and I took a cat with me; I called her Joy,” Nastia said.
Nastia told that when the director found out about it, he was very angry. First, he wanted to get the cat himself, but it ran away and hid under the sofa. So he got even more enraged and promised to take Nastia to “Kulparkivska Street” a street where the Lviv regional clinical psychiatric hospital is located .
“I had already been there once and realized that I would do anything not to get there. I had only one variant: to run away from the boarding school,” the girl recalls.
Nastia ran out of school and hid in a deserted house nearby. In fact, she had neither experience nor skills of travelling without an adult. So, when it was getting dark, she decided to come back to the orphanage. Several police cars had already been waiting for her.
“One policeman slapped my face, and hit me. He was angry. I explained that I didn’t want to go to the lunatic asylum, but it didn’t matter. I was placed into the car and sent to the lunatic asylum for “rehabilitation,” the graduate recollected.
Injections and pills — that’s what was expecting her there.
“They would wake us up at seven, give us pills, and check our mouths to make sure that we swallowed them. Then, they would let teachers come to us for two-three hours. Later we could watch a cartoon, “Zootropolis”, which was switched on and on during the day. But the injections were the worst, they made me feel like a vegetable, I used to just stare at a wall,” the girl remembers.
In the conversation with NGL.media, Bohdan Chechotka, the director of the Lviv regional clinical psychiatric hospital, assumed that the story, told by Nastia Vanio, may be a manipulation. However, he didn’t name any reason for such a manipulation.
The mug, that was gifted by children from the Velykyi Liubin boarding school to doctors of psychiatric hospital (picture provided by Bohdan Chechotka)
“Since September, when the monitoring group came to Velykyi Liubun, many commissions have come to us and checked our papers, we are open to it because we see no violations. I can assure you that Oksana Lemashko, the head of the children’s department, is a Christian and has proper values. And the children who used to come to us from that place were very difficult, please, understand me,” the director of the psychiatric hospital stated.
In Chechotka’s words, all the children were treated exclusively for medical reasons. A total of 15 students of the Velykyi Liubin boarding school were treated in the children’s department of the psychiatric hospital last year, and 20 more — the year before that. At the same time, since Stepan Mashchak was removed from the director’s position (at the end of last September), no child from the boarding school came to this hospital for treatment. Undoubtedly, it raises many questions.
After the conversation with NGL.media, Bohdan Chechotka sent to our messenger service a photo of a cup that the children from Velykyi Liubin had allegedly presented to the employees of the children’s department. This picture was accompanied by Chechotka’s ironic comment, “This is what punitive psychiatry looks like.”
However, independent observers believe that psychiatric treatment is used as punishment in many Ukrainian boarding schools.
“I know it shocks many people, but it is a really common practice in most boarding schools. I personally know graduates for whom it was just a norm: bad behaviour equalled a lunatic asylum… The problem lies in the fact that they are brought there without proper registration in the documents. So, if an inquiry is made regarding a specific child, it seems like he or she has never been there,” said Inna Miroshnychenko in her interview as a member of monitoring groups of the Commissioner for Human Rights.
Without any right to education
One of Nastia’s rare happy memories from the boarding school is the coming of volunteers. During one of them, she met Ira the name is changed at the woman’s request from Lviv. When Nastia was graduating from the boarding school, Ira asked the director to let her go to Lviv to study because they could meet more often there, and she could help the girl.
“Unfortunately, he didn’t allow that. He had an agreement with a technical school in Sokal about sending the students to it. She used to come to us for holidays or weekends for about a year and a half, and then I succeeded in having her transferred to Lviv, and she started living with our family,” Ira recalls.
The volunteer said that the director didn’t disguise his derogatory attitude to children, insulted them, and told them regularly that they would not achieve anything. She also recalled that he didn’t like it when volunteers came and could prohibit their visiting children for several months.
“One day, he got mad because we distributed presents among children on our own. Those were the shoes they had asked us for. He believed that we should have given them for him to distribute. I made up my mind not to take his words personally even when he swore at me because my priority was to meet children,” Ira explained.
Ira played another very important role in this story. It was she who gave the video of 12-year-old Vira to the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights. She confessed that she had to do it because all the attempts to solve the problem locally had failed. Now, she takes part in the investigation and has already been interrogated as a witness.
The everlasting director
Little is known about Stepan Mashchak. He is not active on his Facebook page; he does not respond to messages and calls. We have not managed to talk to him personally. In 20 recent years, he has been the director of the boarding school and told his colleagues that prior to that, he had directed another educational institution.
Stepan Mashchak
According to the register of court rulings, it is known that in 2005, he hired his wife, Oleksandra Mashchak, as a nurse at the boarding school. In January-December 2013, he gave her bonuses and allowances despite the evident conflict of interest. Later, the court ruled that he was to pay a fine of UAH 170 for these actions.
Oleksandra Mashchak stayed in her position at the boarding school even after her husband’s resignation. She refused to talk to NGL.media.
It is also known that Stepan and Oleksandra Mashchak have three sons. One of them, 33-year-old Andrii Mashchak, created a foster care family in 2023 a foster care family is a temporary form of care, it ceases when a child reaches the age of 18 , and took the responsibility to care for a girl from the boarding school, headed by his father, and let her live with his family. However, the child still studies and lives at the boarding school. This fake foster care may be related to the fact that it gives a right for military service deferment.
The volunteers and graduates of the Velykyi Liubin education and rehabilitation centre, who spoke to NGL.media, told us that Stepan Mashchak lives near the boarding school, and children often witnessed his car being loaded with food products from the school dining room or even helped load it.
“He was not the director who cared about children,” Nastia Vanio says.
Just as she came to Velykyi Liubin, she had EUR 150, which she had received from an Italian family. They had given her this money to get braces for her teeth. “Prior to moving, I told the director about this money and about my desire to correct my teeth. He said that it could be done without any problem,” the girl recalls.
She gave the money to the director. Some time later, she reminded him about the braces but heard from him that “it was too late”. “The director said that it could have been done only by the age of 14. Guess how old I was at the time? 14 exactly. He suggested buying the Xiaomi phone instead, and I agreed. I don’t know what he did with the remaining money,” Nastia says.
In December 2024, Stepan Mashchak handed in his resignation. Orest Solokha, who used to be a PT teacher at this boarding school, was appointed the acting director. For several weeks, he promised to have a conversation with NGL.media but a day before the agreed meeting, he claimed that he was not ready to comment on anything.
By the way, the boarding school graduate shared her memories of him too. “He was cool, it was possible to have a great time with him. But if you were late for his class, he would give you ten kicks on your bottom,” she recalled.
The money that doesn’t reach the children
The things, revealed by the monitoring group of the Commissioner for Human Rights in Velykyi Liubin, have shocked many, but not the ones who work with boarding schools. Most activists, NGL.media has spoken to, started the conversation with the words, “It has always been like that, the system should be changed.” The story of Stepan Mashchak has just highlighted an ancient problem.
“Imagine: the state allocates up to UAH 100 thousand per month per one child in an orphanage. And it doesn’t include the money from the charities,” Daria Kasianova, the head of the board of the Ukrainian Child Rights Network, said.
90% of this money will never reach the child; it will be spent on heating and maintaining institutions, paying salaries, and other accompanying expenses.
At the same time, according to the results of the investigation, conducted by “SOS Children’s Villages”, the international charitable organization, one of the relevant reasons why people refuse to adopt is an insufficient level of financial support for parents. So, if this money were re-distributed to support specific families, the situation could change radically.
It should be noted that in 2024, the budget of the Velykyi Liubin education and rehabilitation centre was UAH 14.24 million, which, with the presence of 50 students, makes about UAH 24 thousand per month per each student. Considering the fact that in three recent months, about 20 children have been living there, it is actually about UAH 50 thousand per child a month.
The boarding schools don’t want children to be adopted
In response to the NGL.media’s inquiry, The National Social Service replied that as of the end of last year, 25,648 children were staying in boarding schools around the clock. Over 80% of them have parents, not deprived of their parental rights. So, most children have relatives but are in different complicated life circumstances due to which their caretakers decided to give them to the boarding school.
“Most children in the boarding school do not have a specific status, so it is impossible to adopt them. A few years ago, 90% of the children were like that, now the number is lower but not considerably,” explains Leonid Lebedev, the founder of “Zminy Odne Zhyttia” [“Change One Life”] charitable organization, a counsellor to the Minister of Social Policy in 2019-20. The problem lies in the fact that institutions are interested in such a situation because if there are children — there is financing. At the same time, they have all the instruments for a child to be adopted sooner. For instance, if a child has not been visited by relatives for a long time, the director has a right to submit a request to the court to deprive parents of their parental rights. Then, this child will be included in the list of children who can be adopted.
Leonid Lebedev’s organization is focused on making children from boarding schools and orphanages more visible. Together with photographers and videographers, they go to orphanages and tell the stories of these children on social networks for them to have more chances of finding parents.
According to the data of the office in the children’s issues at the Lviv regional military administration (LRMA), in four recent years, only 11 students of the Velykyi Liubin education and rehabilitation centre were placed into some form of family care Ukraine has four forms of family-type care: adoption, foster care, family-type children’s home, guardianship/trusteeship .
According to Volodymyr Frydrak, the head of the department in children’s issues at the Lviv city council, previously, the situation in Lviv was similar. However, it has changed since “Ridni”, the Centre of social support for children and families, opened in 2021, and 40% of their children have returned to families.
“We take pride in this figure. This percentage of children [placed into families] is directly related to the organization of work in the municipal centre. Our specialists work both with children and parents. Since a boarding school is a temporary refuge, the priority is always for a child to live in the family,” Volodymyr Frydrak explained to NGL.media.
Kyrylo Nevdokha, the head of “DIiMO”, the Office for Children and Youth at the Ministry of Social Policy, believes that most institutionalized facilities keep children “deliberately”. For instance, during the monitoring visit of the office on children’s issues at the Lviv regional military administration to the boarding school in Levandivka [one of Lviv’s districts], it was found that children stayed in the institution for over one year, although their stay should not have exceeded 90 days. This was a group of children from Zaporizhzhia region, evacuated to the boarding school at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
“Children live in institutionalized facilities for years, and it is not by accident. For instance, this is a boarding school in Levandivka: groups of children from Zaporizhzhia were transferred to other institutionalized facilities. What for? To keep a required number of children and ensure continuous financing for the institution. Because when there are children, there is money — the main criterion for such institutions to function,” Kyrylo said.
Noteworthy is the fact that in response to the post of Dmytro Lybinets about the asylum in Levandivka, the Lviv regional military administration replied publicly by calling the words of the Commissioner for Human Rights his personal PR move. Ivan Sobko, the deputy head of the LRMA, even demanded an apology from Lubinets, but to no avail.
A slow reform
Actually, most Ukrainian orphanages should have been closed down by now, if it were not for the war. In 2017, the government adopted the National strategy of reforming the system of institutional care for children in 2017-2026. The strategy envisaged closing all the institutionalized facilities of the boarding school type with more than 15 children, and covering 99% of orphans with family-type care, including 95% of them placed into families.
However, after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, they decided to update the strategy and approved a new document, covering 2024-2028. Generally, the updated strategy replicates the previous one, but two more groups of vulnerable children are added — the ones, brought back after deportation, and the children, who have come from the temporarily occupied territories. The main aim of the strategy has not been changed — 95% of children from the institutional facilities have to be brought up in families.
Vasylyna Dybailo, the director of “Partnership for Every Child” charitable organization, took part in preparing both strategies to reform boarding schools. She is convinced that the sooner institutionalized facilities are closed down, the more children will have a chance for a truly fulfilling future.
“The experience tells us: as soon as there is a bed in a hospital, there is a patient on it. The same is true about boarding schools. We have cases when a child from the boarding school is placed into a foster family at the age of one year and seven months, and this child cannot talk, sit, and have skills that correspond to this age. One month in a family — and the child has learned it all! If the child stayed at the boarding school, the diagnosis would be — development delay,” Vasylyna Dybailo says.
There are cases in Ukraine when the process of depriving parents of their rights lasts for seven years, and during this entire period, the child stays at the boarding school. Marianna Onufryk, the head of NGOs “Social Synergy” and “Family for Persons with Disability”, says that in Great Britain, a child can be placed into a new family as soon as a few days after being taken from the biological one. There is a separate specialization of judges in the country who deal with family matters only.
“In our country, to place a child into a family, they need either to have a status of an orphan or be deprived of parental care. There are many practices abroad when a child may obtain legal status to go to another family in a few days because this is an issue of high priority. Each day, spent at an institutionalized facility, is harmful for them,” Marianna Onufryk says.
Vasylyna Dybailo, her colleague, adds that the success of strategy implementation depends directly on financing and political will to close all the boarding schools.
“Actually, I support the moratorium on placing children under three years old into institutionalized facilities. This way has been chosen by the countries of the post-Soviet block: it is prohibited in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, and Slovenia to place children under 12 into the institutions of around-the-clock care. The studies demonstrate that as long as there are families for the children to go to — that’s where they will be placed. We need a clear prohibition,” Vasylyna Dybailo concludes.
Author Mariana Verbovska, editor Oleh Onysko, infographics and page make-up Nazar Tuziak, translation Nelya Plakhota, illustrations Y16, specifically for NGL.media.