A GRUBBY plastic doll, the size of an egg, peered from beneath a thin blanket on a child’s rusty bed. Of all the things I’d seen at Perechrysta orphanage that day, it was this little doll that moved me most.

A cherished toy belonging to a child who had probably lost everything else. I thought of children back home, living in nice houses, with central heating, clean clothes and their own bedrooms, filled with toys, consoles, TVs and laptops.

The 100 or so children at Perechrysta, an orphanage in western Ukraine, slept in cramped dormitories; rows of beds made of rusting iron and flimsy wood, with thin, stained mattresses. No posters on the walls, cuddly toys or children’s books.

I was there 14 years ago, on a trip with some local aid workers. We delivered clothing, bedding, shoes and toiletries to two orphanages near a little town. Everywhere I went there were reminders of the lasting impact of the 1991 Soviet withdrawal, not least regular power cuts, high unemployment and very little in the way of social welfare. In a country still finding its feet, these orphanages were forgotten places.

Our translator, a local charity worker, (the children often called her ‘Mama’), told us that they although they had limited education it wasn’t officially recognised, so they started adult life with no qualifications, branded social outcasts. No surprise that many drifted into crime and prostitution. While I was at Perechrysta a group of children were dropped off in a van. They’d been ‘rounded up’ after spending the summer begging. Some children were dropped off at a lonely railway station and told to ‘find the orphanage’.

Much of the building resembled a Victorian workhouse. The toilets were holes in the ground in a crumbling shower block. The man who ran the place was good-hearted and clearly cared about the children. He too had grown up in an orphanage. But like others I met in that deprived region, including hospital staff and firefighters, he was forced to work with limited funds and resources.

I’ve never forgotten the children at Perechrysta; the smiling faces gathered around as we handed out shoes and sweets. One girl asked if she and her little brother could come home with us. Next to her bed was a framed picture - instead of a mother’s face it was a superhero ripped from a comic.

Those children will be young adults now. I have thought of them in recent days, as the Russian army makes its presence felt on the border and Ukraine prepares for the worst. Civilians, even children and pensioners, have been pictured training with wooden rifles.

I grew up in Bradford, which has a large Ukrainian community. Some of my schoolfriends were from Ukrainian families.

The director of Bradford Ukrainian Club, Ewhen Chymera, told the T&A that friends in Kyiv are “discussing the what-ifs. They are making those contiguous plans that you can’t fathom in the modern world.” Another member said his relatives in Ukraine are putting bomb shelters and evacuation plans in place.

For the children in those forgotten but still existing orphanages, places that are already casualties of past Soviet conflict, I fear there may be no such urgency.