2025
Mykola Kuleba
Acceptance Speech for the Civil Courage Prize
Mykola Kuleba / New York, January 2026
“Thank you.
Thank you to the Train Foundation and the Civil Courage Prize Committee for this extraordinary honor. To stand among those who have been recognized with this prize — people who have confronted tyranny, who have refused to be silent, who have paid the price for their convictions — is deeply humbling.
This prize honors "the extraordinary few among us who resolutely pursue freedom for many despite the consequences to themselves." But tonight, I must tell you: I do not stand here alone. This recognition belongs to every volunteer who has driven into a war zone to pull a child from a basement. To every family who opened their home to a traumatized child. To every member of my team at Save Ukraine who has crossed borders, faced down interrogators, and refused to give up on a single child.
I stand here representing thousands of children whose courage far exceeds my own.
The Question That Changed Everything
Let me take you back to the late 1990s, to the streets of Kyiv. The Soviet Union has recently collapsed, and with it, the foundations our society relied on for generations. The totalitarian system that once dictated every aspect of our lives is suddenly gone. That system discouraged thought and suppressed empathy. Our only obligation was obedience: trust the system, ask no questions, and flawlessly execute whatever the system commands of us.
Ukraine descended into chaos. We, as a country and as a people, lost our footing. We had to learn how to rebuild everything from scratch. And, in that turmoil, the first and deepest wounds were borne by our children.
Families were falling apart. Financial and moral collapse swept through the country. Orphanages were overflowing and yet absolutely incapable of protecting the children inside of them. In this cruel reality, survival became impossible. So, the children fled. They spilled onto the streets where they found others like them, those who had been driven from their homes due to violence, alcoholism, or drug addiction of their parents.
This is how entire communities of street children were formed.
They lived for years in basements, sewer systems, abandoned buildings, and heating tunnels. In these hidden worlds children raped each other, sometimes killed. They began using drugs from a very early age. Thousands of children were trapped in this reality, and the state was powerless to protect them. No one stepped forward willingly to take responsibility for their lives.
I was a young businessman then, a Christian who believed deeply in God. And I could not understand: Why were these children forced to suffer so much? Why didn't the system care? Why didn't society care?
This question became a deep internal challenge for me. I prayed for an answer. And the answer I received was very simple:
"I am sending you to save these children."
I realized this was not my decision. This was not my ambition. This was a will I could not resist. So I listened and began going to the streets every day after work. I talked with these children. I tried to understand their stories. And I asked myself: what specifically can be done to save even one of them?
The Moment We Cannot Get Back
I remember one boy whose parents were alcoholics. He had been taken to an orphanage, from which he repeatedly fled. The police would find him, return him, and he would flee again.
One winter night, he climbed into my car to sleep. He lit a candle for warmth. But he was already using drugs. He fell asleep, and the car caught fire. He barely escaped. The street had already changed him too deeply. His psyche was damaged. I tried to help, but I saw clearly: the moment when he could still be saved had been lost.
He later committed murder and went to prison for many years.
This boy taught me something crucial: if we don't intervene in time, if we don't do everything possible to prevent a child from ending up on the street, their life can be destroyed irreversibly. That is when I understood my mission was not just about rescue. It was about building a system — a system where children don't have to spend years on the streets, where they don't have to become criminals or simply die. A system where every child can live in dignity, in a family.
Standing Between Two Armies
Let me tell you about a different kind of street. One between two armies.
It was 2014, during the first Russian invasion. I learned that a nine-year-old boy was living in the village of Pisky, directly between Russian forces and the Ukrainian army. The village was under constant shelling. Everything was destroyed. The military told me his mother was too afraid to leave. She believed if they left, they would be killed on the road.
When we arrived in our armored vehicle, I was wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet. This child was completely defenseless.
When I met him, he could identify every weapon just by the sound of the shots. He had lived under constant bombardment for nine months. While I flinched at each explosion, he didn't even blink. The trauma had settled so deeply that he no longer registered danger at all.
I managed to convince his mother to take a chance with us. We evacuated them. That village was later completely destroyed. No one lives there today.
This story crystallized something for me: Children cannot and must not become prey to war. And since 2014, we have rescued thousands and hundreds of them along with their families.
The Stories Russia Doesn't Want You to Hear
Which brings me to why we're here tonight, to the work that has consumed the last four years of my life.
Since February 24, 2022, Russia has pursued a systematic campaign of abducting Ukrainian children.
They seize them from their parents and families to enroll them in so-called "re-education" camps. They force them into military training institutions. They pressure them to accept Russian passports while under duress. They threaten them with psychiatric hospitals and pills to "calm their enthusiasm" before they execute their final goal: to turn Ukrainian children into a new generation of Russian soldiers to fight against Ukraine, NATO and the United States.
But some children refuse to break.
Vladyslav Rudenko was seventeen when occupation authorities forcibly took him to Crimea. He refused a Russian passport. One day, he took down the Russian flag from the flagpole. For this, they locked him in isolation for five days — a small room with barred windows and phone access once a day for five minutes. They placed a foul-smelling bag over Vlad’s head as a form of psychological torture. Medical staff threatened him with a straitjacket and psychiatric hospital.
Before he and his mother were released, the Russian Federal Security Service (aka FSB) interrogated them on a polygraph. They blocked them at two checkpoints. Only on the third attempt did they manage to enter Ukraine.
Then there's Rostyslav Lavrov. He was fifteen when his grandmother died on the third day of occupation, and his mother — who had mental disabilities — was taken to a hospital. Rostyslav lived alone for four months under occupation. Then the Russian military came with weapons and gave him an ultimatum: leave his home to attend a Russian re-education camp or an orphanage "who knows where."
They sent him to camps where he was isolated four times — fifteen days in punishment cells for refusing to submit to their commands. He hid a second phone, charging it with power banks other patriotic children smuggled to him. While other children were picked up by parents, no one came for Rostyslav. Still, he never stopped believing he would return to Ukraine.
We organized his escape through Russia into Belarus. And when he stepped onto the neutral road between borders and saw the Ukrainian flag, he did not just walk, he soared with joy.
These are the children this prize honors tonight. Their civil courage far exceeds anything I have shown.
The Meaning of Civil Courage
So what is civil courage?
For me, it has been a twenty-six-year journey of deliberate choices. Choices to not remain silent when silence is safer. To not retreat when fear seems rational. To act, knowing that the cost of inaction is a child’s life broken before it begins.
I stand between tyranny and childhood. I refuse to accept that any system — Soviet, post-Soviet, or Russian occupation — has the right to shape or shatter a child’s destiny.
This is not heroism. This is simply the refusal to look away.
I think of a boy named Illia. I met him on the streets when he was fifteen — intelligent, loved to read, but constantly lying, stealing, unable to trust. One day we had a frank conversation. He told me his story: he had been adopted as a child but didn't know it. When he was thirteen, his adoptive father died, and his mother — who had never wanted the adoption — told him she didn't love him.
This broke him. He ran away and ended up on the streets.
I told him I would never judge him, and that we would protect him — even from the police. We did protect him. He went through rehabilitation.
Today, Illia is a famous film director. He has his own family and a child. He has told me repeatedly that without that conversation, his life would have gone a completely different way.
This is what we do: we transform generations. We break cycles. We give children the chance to become not what their circumstances dictated, but what they choose to become.
Current Situation and Call to the World
But I must be honest with you: we are losing ground.
Russia continues to abduct Ukrainian children. Hundreds of thousands remain in Russian-controlled territories. The international response has been inadequate. The mechanisms to return these children are painfully slow. Every day of delay is a day when re-education deepens, when trauma compounds, when the moment to save them slips further away.
Russia’s abduction and forced indoctrination of Ukrainian children has become one of the most devastating and least understood fronts of the war. More than 20,000 children have been taken from their families, stripped of their language, identity, and faith, and pushed into a system designed to erase who they are. Many are abducted deep into Russia, placed with Russian families, or sent to militarized “camps” where they are taught to renounce Ukraine and fight against the United States and NATO as enemies. Inside occupied territories, daily life is defined by fear: soldiers on every street, homes raided without warning, and children pressured to hide anything that reveals their Ukrainian identity. Behind this new Iron Curtain, over a million children live under constant coercion, surveillance, and propaganda, an assault not only on their childhoods but on Ukraine’s future.
Against this darkness, Save Ukraine has built one of the most daring and comprehensive child‑protection operations in the world. Through a modern Underground Railroad, our teams brave considerable danger to travel thousands of miles into Russia and occupied regions to rescue children who have been taken, threatened, or forced into military training. Once safe, children receive medical care, trauma recovery, and long‑term reintegration support so they can begin to heal and rebuild their lives. We have documented testimonies from more than a thousand rescued children, each one revealing the same truth: this is not the chaos of war, this is a deliberate campaign to break families and reshape a generation. Save Ukraine stands in that gap—restoring identities, reuniting families, and refusing to let Russia’s war decide a child’s destiny.
But we cannot do this alone. We need courage from the international community that matches the courage of these children, their families, and my colleagues who carry out these rescues.
Because when you systematically kidnap children, force them to forget their language, their culture, their identity — when you threaten them physical torture and with psychiatric wards for saying "Glory to Ukraine" — you are not just harming individual children. You are attempting to erase people.
And yet, the opposite is also true: every act of compassion, attention, love and care does more than save one life. It shapes every generation that follows. Their children. Their families. The world in which they will live.
This is the power of civil courage. It does not stop with one generation. It multiplies.
In Closing
I accept this prize on behalf of every child who has refused to break. Every mother and grandmother who courageously traveled into the heart of danger to confront the Russian military and reclaim their children. Every volunteer who drove towards danger rather than away from it.. Every family who opened their home. Every person who has chosen courage over comfort.
And I make you this promise: we will not stop. We will cross every border, navigate every bureaucracy, confront every authority that stands between a kidnapped child and their home.
Because children cannot and must not become prey to war.
When we are brave and ready to fight for every life, we have the power to save every child caught in the epicenter of violence, where death comes in a single second.
This is, for me, the true meaning of civil courage.
Thank you.
Slava Ukraini.”