Mykola Kuleba

Mykola Mykolaiovych Kuleba (Ukrainian: Микола Миколайович Кулеба, born 23 March 1972) is a Ukrainian statesman, children’s rights advocate and humanitarian. He is a pioneer of Ukraine’s children’s rights movement and initiated child welfare reforms and legislation to move Ukraine away from Soviet-era policies towards Western best practices. Kuleba is co-founder and head of Save Ukraine. , Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children’s Rights (2014-2021), head of the Kyiv Children’s Service (2006-2014), and co-founder of the Ukraine Without Orphans Alliance. Kuleba is the winner of the 2023 Magnitsky Human Rights Awards for “Outstanding Human Rights Activist”. Since 2022 Save Ukraine organized 15 rescue missions and brought back 231 Ukrainian children from Russia and Russia-occupied territories

Early life
Kuleba was born on 23 March 1972 in Kyiv, in the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union. In 1994 he graduated from the Kyiv Institute of National Economy. In 2008 Kuleba graduated from European University of Finance, Information Systems, Management and Business.

Social activities
From 1993 to 2002 Kuleba was a businessman. Mykola decided to devote his life to saving children when he met a group of homeless children who lived next to a sewer drainage site near Kyiv’s Demiivska Square. During this period, about 100,000 children in Ukraine were living on the streets. As a result of that experience, Mykola Kuleba created a network of centers in Kyiv to care for orphans, with the goal of returning them to their homes or placing them with a foster family them.

Public service activity
Kuleba was appointed the Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children's Rights 17 December 2014. In this role, he united and coordinated the government and the public sector to develop a cohesive state-level policies and programs that created effective mechanisms for preventing, detecting and combating human trafficking and providing assistance to victims of human trafficking. Kuleba is credited with reducing levels of human trafficking in Ukraine through these initiatives. He authored the national strategy for deinstitutionalization, and created policies and introduced penalties to protect children from bullying, including cyberbullying.

Activities after the beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war
With Russia’s invasion of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, he co-founded the Save Ukraine rescue network, with coordinates dozens of organizations, volunteers, individuals and legal entities to help internally displaced persons, with a special emphasis on children. Save Ukraine has evacuated over 105,000 people from the frontlines and provided more than 120,000 people with psychological assistance. Every day, the Save Ukraine hotline receives more than 300 requests for assistance and runs an expanding network of community centers that addresses war-related trauma and works to restore dignity to people’s lives by providing food, shelter, medical and mental health care. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Save Ukraine been engaged in the return of deported children to Ukraine. Mykola Kuleba’s team has returned over 230 forcibly transferred children back to Ukraine from Russia and the temporarily occupied territories

Personal life
Kuleba is married and has four children.