A one-month exhibition at World Trade Centre 2 wants Jakarta to look straight at what 1.6 million Ukrainian children are living through  and to ask Indonesia to help bring them home. 

At a Glance

• When: August 24 – September 25, 2026 (opening reception August 24, 18:30, TBC)
• Where: Main Lobby, World Trade Centre 2, Jl. Jenderal Sudirman Kav. 29-31, Jakarta 12920
• Organizers: Embassy of Ukraine in Indonesia and the Delegation of the European Union to Indonesia
• Scale of the crisis: an estimated 1.6 million Ukrainian children remain under Russian control
  

A child's diary entry doesn't need a headline to break your heart. That's the bet behind "Living the War: Children," an exhibition landing in the middle of Jakarta's business district this August  not in a gallery, but in the lobby of a building where thousands of people walk past every day without planning to think about war at all.

Living the War: Children is an immersive exhibition by BringKidsBackUA, organized by the Embassy of Ukraine in Indonesia together with the Delegation of the European Union in Jakarta. It runs from August 24 to September 25, 2026, at the Main Lobby of World Trade Centre 2 in South Jakarta, and it tells the story of Ukrainian children's daily reality during the Russian invasion through photographs, personal drawings, and diary notes. Entry follows the exhibition's own visitor guidelines, and the opening reception is scheduled for August 24 at 18:30.

Credit :  the Embassy of Ukraine in Indonesia 

What Is BringKidsBackUA?

BringKidsBackUA is a Ukrainian state initiative launched by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on May 31, 2023. It brings together Ukrainian government bodies, civil society groups, and international partners with one job: track down and return Ukrainian children who were deported or forcibly transferred by Russia, then support their reintegration at home.

The scale of the problem is hard to hold in your head. Ukraine's own "Children of War" database has documented thousands of cases, and Bring Kids Back UA estimates that around 1.6 million children remain under Russian occupation. In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, over the state-sanctioned abductions. Progress is real but slow: as of early 2026, the initiative had confirmed 2,000 children returned home since it began.

"Thanks to our Bring Kids Back UA initiative, we have secured 2,126 returns of Ukrainian children. We will continue this work."  President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

Credit :  the Embassy of Ukraine in Indonesia 

What Will Visitors Actually See?

The exhibition is built as a journey, not a display. After two introductory panels, visitors enter a space designed to feel like "Limbo"  the first thing they meet is a large-scale photograph meant to convey the sheer size of the tragedy before a single individual story is told.

From there, the route splits into thematic blocks. Each one leans on a mix of photographs, children's own drawings, and pages from their diaries  first-person material rather than statistics. It's a quiet, paper-and-ink kind of storytelling, built to slow busy Jakarta commuters down long enough to read a child's handwriting.

The strategic goal behind the exhibition is explicit: organizers want to engage the Republic of Indonesia to join the International Coalition for the Return of Ukrainian Children, and to draw sustained attention to the abductions as the war continues.

For a WTC 2 lobby that usually smells of espresso and printer toner, hosting diary pages from a war zone is its own kind of statement  and that contrast is exactly the point.