Bring Kids Back | Teddy Bears Installation in Toronto: 20,000 Teddy Bears Draw Attention to Ukrainian Children Taken from Ukraine by Russia

TORONTO, Canada — September 18, 2026. From September 18 to 20, the Bring Kids Back | Teddy Bears Installation is being presented at the Bloor West Village Toronto Ukrainian Festival in Toronto. The large-scale public installation was created by Razom for Ukraine in partnership with the American Coalition for Ukraine. The project draws attention to Ukrainian children who have been deported or forcibly displaced by Russia and to ongoing efforts to bring them home.

The installation is being presented during the 30th Bloor West Village Toronto Ukrainian Festival, the largest Ukrainian festival in North America. According to the organizers, the festival attracts more than one million visitors annually and has become one of the largest public gatherings of the Ukrainian community outside Ukraine.

Bring Kids Back | Teddy Bears Installation is an international project first presented in April 2026 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. There, 20,000 teddy bears formed a 230-foot-long wall. According to the project’s concept, each toy represents one Ukrainian child taken by Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. More than 120 volunteers helped create the original installation. Following its presentation in Washington, the project began travelling to other cities to help keep the issue of returning Ukrainian children visible in the international public sphere.

The number 20,000 is used by the organizers as a visual representation of documented cases and does not indicate the final number of children affected by deportation or forced displacement.

The choice of the teddy bear is deliberate — it is a universally recognizable symbol of childhood, safety and home. The names and faces of many children cannot be used publicly because of the sensitivity of the process surrounding their return. The project therefore tells their story without identifying individual children: instead of an abstract statistic, visitors see thousands of children’s toys, each representing an individual life, a family, and a childhood interrupted by war.

In Toronto, this powerful image appears in one of the most visited spaces of the Ukrainian community in Canada. Alongside concerts, the parade, Ukrainian food and cultural programming, Bring Kids Back | Teddy Bears Installation creates a space with a very different tone — one where visitors can understand the scale of the issue not through numbers or news headlines, but through an image that resonates regardless of language or background.

Meest is serving as the logistics partner for Bring Kids Back | Teddy Bears Installation in Canada.

The company coordinated the transportation of the installation and supported its presentation in Toronto. For Meest, participation in the project continues its long-standing engagement with Ukrainian communities in Canada and its support for humanitarian and community initiatives connected to Ukraine. This year, the company is also one of the sponsors of the festival.

“It was important for us to help bring this project to Toronto. In logistics, we work every day with distances, borders and the route home. But this installation represents something on an entirely different scale: thousands of children whose journey home is still unfinished. If our work can help make this issue visible to even more people, we believe it is important to be part of it,” said Ivan Marchenko, Executive Director of Meest Corporation Inc.

About Meest

Meest has been operating in Canada for more than 35 years, providing international parcel delivery, commercial cargo transportation, money transfer services and logistics solutions for e-commerce. The company serves customers across Canada and has an extensive network of offices and agents throughout North America. For many years, Meest has consistently supported the development of the Ukrainian community and its social, cultural and humanitarian initiatives.

About Razom for Ukraine

Razom for Ukraine is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization founded in 2014 following Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity. Today, Razom works in humanitarian aid, healthcare, education, public policy and civic engagement, bringing together teams and partners across the United States and Ukraine.

About the American Coalition for Ukraine

The American Coalition for Ukraine (ACU) is a nonpartisan coalition of U.S.-based nonprofit organizations established in 2022 to coordinate efforts in support of Ukraine. Today, it brings together more than 40 organizations and works in the areas of education, representation and protection of citizens’ rights, coalition-building, and raising awareness among the American public.

Bring Kids Back | Teddy Bears Installation will remain on display at the Bloor West Village Toronto Ukrainian Festival through September 20. Among thousands of visitors and hundreds of festival activities, this wall needs neither a stage nor a lengthy explanation. Twenty thousand teddy bears turn a number into an image that is difficult to walk past. Behind every number is a child. And every one of them must come home.

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