Amid unrelenting attacks on Ukraine, mental health researchers seek to understand psychological toll
Studies of soldiers and civilians could provide clues to diagnosis and treatments
- 31 Jul 2025
- 2:00 PM ET
- ByRichard Stone
In the child’s drawing, a blue-and-yellow umbrella the size of a city block shields homes and apartments from fighter jets screaming toward Dnipro, an industrial city in southeastern Ukraine that Russia has hit hard and often during the war. Ukraine Wants Peace! the elementary school artist titled the work, an entry in a competition staged earlier this year by the M.S. Poliakov Institute of Geotechnical Mechanics for families of its staff. “This is a small way to help people cope. To relieve the terrible stress we are all under,” says Anatoly Bulat, the institute’s director.
After years of daily air raid alerts and predawn fusillades of drones and missiles that disrupt sleep and stoke anxiety, malaise is rampant across Ukraine. “I feel like my youth is being stolen. What should be the best time of my life,” says Oleksandra Kyselova, a 24-year-old legal expert at the National Research Foundation of Ukraine (NRFU) in Kyiv. She says she has become so inured that, despite the obvious danger, she no longer seeks shelter during attacks. “Not all wounds are visible,” says Oksana Mankovska, a molecular biologist at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics (IMBG).
As Ukraine’s scientific establishment pivots toward war-related work, the war’s mental health burden is one major focus. Later this year NRFU, with support from the Research Council of Norway, will call for proposals for mental health studies that would likely cover all segments of society, from soldiers on the front lines to civilians taking refuge in havens in western Ukraine, far from the fighting. “Sadly, Ukraine has become a huge field for this research,” says Olga Polotska, NRFU’s executive director.
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One obvious research target is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a malady with symptoms including mood changes, flashbacks, and insomnia. The Ukrainian military does not release statistics on PTSD incidence among soldiers. But rates in the civilian population appear to be formidable. In 2024, online survey results published in The Lancet reported PTSD levels of 47% among civilians (mostly women and children) who had fled the country, 33% of those who were internally displaced, and 39% of those remained in their homes.
Because PTSD’s psychological symptoms can vary, researchers have also sought verified biological markers, such as elevated levels of certain blood compounds. To make headway, a team led by Mankovska is studying soldiers at a rehabilitation center near Kyiv diagnosed with PTSD, PTSD plus traumatic brain injury, and complex PTSD (CPTSD), a more severe form that can develop after chronic exposure to trauma.
Because PTSD is sometimes associated with autoimmune conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and dermatitis, the scientists are keying in on cytokines: signaling proteins that trigger and regulate immune responses. They are sending serum samples from ill soldiers and controls to Holden Maecker, an immunologist at Stanford University, to test for the presence of up to 250 cytokines. Researchers think it “unlikely that there would be one or a few cytokines that would totally discriminate between PTSD and non-PTSD,” Maecker says. But one hope, he says, is that the Ukrainian team will find “a constellation of cytokines” linked to PTSD.
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Working with molecular biologist Victor Dosenko of the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology, Mankovska’s team has found that PTSD and CPTSD patients appear to have distinct patterns of DNA methylation, in which methyl groups added to DNA turn genes on or off. “We have found very high levels of methylation” in afflicted soldiers, which could promote accelerated biological aging and other telltale effects, says IMBG’s Leonid Shevchenko.
They are also exploring whether exosomes—vesicles that ferry proteins, RNA, and other molecules between cells—carry immune-related molecules heralding PTSD. “We need to dive deeper,” Mankovska says. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of PTSD sufferers in Ukraine for their research.
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