While the world’s most powerful men debate Ukraine’s future in palaces and over secure phone lines, Ukraine has already written its response underground. Beneath the shelled cities and rutted frontline villages, a quiet revolution is underway: brand-new schools, built below the surface, equipped with state-of-the-art lighting, ventilation, water and food, designed to protect and educate the children Russia has been trying to erase. These are not improvised shelters. They are a declaration. Ukraine is not waiting for diplomacy to catch up with its children’s futures. It is building those futures now, in defiance and at great cost. If you want to understand what Ukraine is fighting for—and what it needs from us—start here. Ukraine’s children are the peace plan.

I’ve been to dozens of villages along Ukraine’s frontlines over the last four years. While talks continue among world leaders, tens of millions of Ukrainians—each living in harm’s way—remain relentless in their resolve to triumph as Ukrainians. UNICEF last week reported that more than one-third of Ukraine’s children remain displaced on the eve of the all-out war’s fourth anniversary—more than 2.5 million children.

Conditions in Ukraine have evolved over my 14 humanitarian trips, from ill-equipped child safe houses in the west to isolated, de-occupied and under-resourced........

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