"700000 children were taken to Russia". Why Russia needs Ukrainian children and what chances of returning them home are
Back in the summer, Russian TV channels and online media reported that children from occupied Ukrainian cities and villages were being taken to Russian camps. Allegedly for rehabilitation.
On August 31, Russian journalists reported on the website "Kuban-24" that 300 children from the "liberated" districts of Kharkiv Oblast arrived at the Medvezhonok camp in the village of Kabardinka near Gelendzhik.
“Among us, there are children of different ages, children who need additional rehabilitation, psychological rehabilitation. Some have been through a lot, and we really want them to spend these 21 days, which start today, in a happy childhood,” says Valeriia Pesotska, “representative of the education department” of Kupiansk Raion, Kharkiv Oblast.
In the story, Russians promise Ukrainian children dancing, games, entertainment, and, of course, the very rehabilitation for which they were brought here more than a thousand kilometers from home. The propagandists call 21 days in the children's camp “a little life”.
But in September, when the Ukrainian military began to liberate the occupied Kharkiv Oblast, the Russian TV channel NTV published another story - that Ukrainian children should return home, but “they can’t go there so far”.
On September 16, the Russian appointee, “chairman of the council of ministers of Kharkiv Oblast”, Andrii Alieksieienko said that children from Kharkiv Oblast, who came to rest in the Krasnodar Krai, will stay in the resort “until the situation changes, until their way home becomes safe”.
For Ukrainian high school students, the Russians organized learning directly in the camp buildings. And younger students go to the village school together with local children.
The journalist of the propaganda TV channel says that allegedly no one feels a serious difference among children, there is no language barrier. At the same time, textbooks on the Russian language and serious Ukrainian students at desks are shown in the background.
“To the camp for rehabilitation”
Olha, her four children, and her husband lived in a village in Vovchansk Raion, right on the border with Russia. They tried to leave for the territory controlled by Ukraine five times, but each time they were stopped by disturbing news: the cars from the convoy were shot.
“It was like a lottery — whether they would shoot or not. I was very afraid for the children. Missiles and fighter planes were flying over us to Kharkiv. I did not allow my children to leave the house. I didn't even let them take the garbage to the trash can three houses away,” says Olha.
During the first months of occupation, the woman tried not to cross paths with Russians. She did not take their humanitarian aid and did not go outside. She went to Vovchansk only when necessary - to visit the pediatrician and back.
However, on May 11, the Russians themselves came to Olha. They searched everything in the house and took her husband to Vovchansk — to the aggregate plant, where they kept and tortured the locals.
“A neighbor complained about us — the day before we turned on loud music in the car in our yard. And he said that he would go to turn us in to the Russians. And so it happened — two days later they came to us. They were looking for, as they said, “contraband”, that is, weapons. They even inspected the jars with conservation in the cellar”.
They pointed a machine gun at Olha's husband, threatened to shoot him in the leg, and demanded to hand over people with pro-Ukrainian views. When they did not achieve anything in a day, they let him go home.
The Russians never came to them again. But one day, when the woman went to the village council for humanitarian aid, the locals began to persuade her to send her 12-year-old daughter Alina to the camp for rehabilitation.
Olha had her doubts but thought that her daughter, who has a chronic illness, and seizures, could use some rest. She was finally convinced by her fellow villagers who told her that children from Kupiansk had already gone on such a vacation and returned.
So in the morning of August 27, the woman brought Alina to the village council building, where up to two dozen parents with children had already gathered, and put her in a school bus that went to Russia.
“A teacher from Vovchansk was with the children. We were promised that she would accompany them throughout the session and bring them back home. I wrote a power of attorney for her and attached a photocopy of my passport and Alina's birth certificate. I also bought my daughter a Russian SIM card for a mobile phone so that we could keep in touch. Although we were persuaded not to give children phones.
And I also ordered her if she is insulted or something happens, to tell me: ‘The stewed carrots are tasteless’. These words would have meant for me that I had to go and get my daughter”.
“Do you need to return your daughter there?”
Olha understood that her daughter needed to be saved, without words about tasteless stewed carrots.
In early September, the Ukrainian military liberated the village. Olha was happy, but the question arose, how to get her daughter out of the camp? After all, now there was a border with Russia again.
“I called Alina, she was crying. She said that they were convinced that in Ukraine the military shoot everyone who leaves the house. I told her that it was not true, that we were de-occupied. I also asked her to give the phone to their counselor to find out the phone number of the camp director,” says Olha.
When the woman called the head of the Medvezhonok camp, she answered unequivocally: “We cannot give the child back. It is dangerous. There is war there. Do you need to return your daughter there?”
“It was important for me to get her out of the system as soon as possible”
After the de-occupation of Kharkiv Oblast, the media got there, and information about the deportation of children allegedly for "rehabilitation" surfaced. Daria Kasianova, program director of the International Charitable Organization “SOS Children's Villages Ukraine”, learned about the first case of deportation of a Kharkiv child to Russia from a Brussels journalist. “He asked: ‘Do we know anything about Ukrainian children being in Gelendzhik?’ After that, parents of deported children began to write. I also knew that earlier some people still managed to take their children from Russian camps. It was a good signal for us, which meant that we would also succeed.”
The organization had experience. In 2014, they returned Ukrainian children when the occupiers took them out of occupied Donetsk.
This time, Daria collected information bit by bit: from social media posts, and locals, because there were practically no social workers, children's services, or heads of united territorial communities in the de-occupied territories.
Gathering together parents from thirty families, SOS Children's Villages Ukraine, volunteers, and government representatives began working to bring the children back to Ukraine. Olha's daughter Alina was also among them.
“It was important for me to get my daughter out of the system as soon as possible, that is, from the camp. Russian teachers have already started giving lessons to the children,” the woman said.
At first, Olha hoped that Alina would be taken by her Russian relatives, but the camp administration said that children would be given only to their parents. If someone was unable to go to Russia, they had to draw up a power of attorney and all documents in accordance with the requirements of Russian legislation, i.e. go to Russia anyway.
Former representative of the Commissioner for the Rights of the Child and Family Aksana Filipishyna says that in this way the Russians hoped to keep some of the children.
“This cynical decision — to give children only in the hands of parents — was made with the assumption that not all parents will come for their children. And this means that Russians will still be able to keep some of them.”
Olha, together with two other villagers, began to urgently apply for a foreign passport and prepare for the trip to the camp. At the same time, she talked to Alina for at least half an hour every day and convinced her daughter that she would return home soon.
“Alina was crying all the time. I wanted her to improve her health in the camp, but it turned out quite the opposite — she was even more stressed than when she was at home.”
“We thought we would never see each other again”
For several days, Olha was going to the camp. She was worried that everything would fail, that the Russians would change their minds - after all, Vovchansk Raion was actively shelled again.
“We got into a traffic jam in Gelendzhik in the evening, and there was a possibility that we would not be given our children after 6 or 7 pm, but would be told to wait for the next day. Some even had thoughts to spend the night and go for the children in the morning”.
On October 9, around 10 pm, Ukrainian mothers reached the Medvezhonok camp. They went to pick up their children by four. Olha and Alina hugged each other around midnight.
“It was very emotional. We cried a lot. We thought that we would never see each other again. We were afraid to the last that they would not give us our children, that they would find a reason to leave them in Russia.”
On that day, the Ukrainian side managed to return 37 children from the camp. The Ministry of Reintegration, the State Migration Service, SOS Children's Villages Ukraine, and carriers were involved in the process.
The next morning, women with children went back. And at 8 am the Russians massively shelled most of the cities of Ukraine. Olha does not rule out that if they had arrived later at the camp, the Russians might have refused to give the children back, citing the dangerous conditions in Ukraine.
At the end of our conversation, the woman asks not to mention the real names of her and her daughter. “People in the village talk a lot, so much negativity. We even went to the dentist to treat our teeth, and I said that Alina had a filling in the camp. And the doctor immediately said: ‘How could you?’ It was difficult for me to make this decision — to let my child go to Russia. I cursed myself every day that I did it”.
More than 700 thousand children could be deported. 96 were returned.
It is not known exactly how many children were deported by Russians. The portal “Children of War” refers to more than 10.5 thousand.
Aksana Filipishyna explains: this is only verified information in cases where the deportation was reported by the child's relatives or state authorities.
“Access to the occupied territories is limited, so the real scale may be much larger. Probably, more than 700 thousand children could be taken to Russia”.
This includes children who were deported by Russians from boarding schools, occupied cities and villages, from destroyed Mariupol, as well as those who were taken to camps.
“Unfortunately, due to the very passive position of international organizations, in particular the International Committee of the Red Cross, today we are not able to record the exact number of our children and where they are,” said the head of the Office of the President Andriy Yermak.
Since the beginning of the full-scale war, only 96 children have been returned to Ukraine: 69 — from the territory of Russia, and 27 — from temporarily occupied Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts.
“Of these 96, 37 were taken by parents. And the remaining 59 have individual stories that Ukraine worked on through difficult negotiations. Mostly these are children who were on the territory of Mariupol: two from Mariupol vocational school, and two groups of children from family-type orphanages who found themselves without foster parents. And there also were cases when Russians deported children whose parents died. Each case of return is extremely difficult because each time Russia sets different conditions,” says Aksana Filipishyna and assures that the fact that Russians deport Ukrainian children from the occupied territories violates the norms of International Humanitarian Law, the Geneva Convention, and has signs of genocide.
“On May 30, Putin issued an act on simplifying the granting of Russian citizenship to children from the occupied regions. This means that as soon as our children are granted Russian citizenship, they can automatically potentially be adopted. And the adoptive parents have the right to change the child's surname, name, date, and place of birth. That is, to erase from legal documents all biological identification, a link to their roots. Children are artificially russified, they cease to be Ukrainians. This clearly falls under the Genocide Convention.”
Thus, in late October, Russia’s Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova adopted a boy from Mariupol and noted that 350 orphans from Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts have already been adopted by Russians, and more than a thousand children are waiting for adoption.
In turn, Ukraine, simplified the legislation in March, in particular, for appointing a guardian for a child whose parents were killed or are physically absent from the controlled territory.
Ukrainian children were deported by the occupiers to Rostov, Voronezh, Kursk regions, the Moscow region, Krasnoyarsk and Krasnodar Krais, Yamalo-Nenets Okrug, and the occupied Crimea. With the onset of cold weather, they may be transported inland, as far away from the Ukrainian border as possible.
Alina has been at home with her parents, brothers, and sister for over a month now. It seems that she still does not believe it. Olha has to remind her all the time:
“‘Alina, you are home, everything is fine,' I tell her every day.”