What Is It Like to Be a Child Experiencing Ambiguous Loss During Russia’s War Against Ukraine?

This study aims to reveal the underlying structure of the experience of ambiguous loss and explore how general aspects of the loss are embodied and embedded in the case under investigation. The research used a qualitative approach to the studied phenomenon: interpretive phenomenological analysis. The data were collected through semistructured interviews with eight children aged 10–16 who experienced the disappearance of one or both parents due to the war. The findings challenge stage-based and closure-oriented models of grief, emphasizing the nonlinear, embodied, and relational “nature” of children’s experience of ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss disrupts children’s sense of time, continuity, and meaning, producing affective ambivalence, depressive alienation, and the coexistence of parallel timelines of life with and without the lost parent.