Kidnappers: How Russian MPs and FSB officers orchestrated child trafficking of Kherson orphans

About 50 children from the Kherson orphanage were abducted by Russian State Duma members with the help of collaborators from Kherson and Crimea. The hromadske investigative team has established the full chronology of this operation and found unique documents and evidence of the crime. Here's how it happened.

"The picture was, to put it mildly, not for the faint of heart. There were a lot of people, the room was dark and damp. The floor was wet, there were mattresses on it, and children were crawling on them, from babies to four-year-olds. They had already spent one night there. And we realized that if these children stayed here for a few more days, it would be the end for them," Pavlo Smolyakov, pastor of the local Golgotha Baptist Church, describes how he saw the orphans of the Kherson Children's Home on February 25, 2022.

As of the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, there were approximately 70 children in the facility. Since there was no basement or shelter in the orphanage, doctors and educators moved the orphans to a shelter across the street from the facility. It was there that Pastor Smolyakov saw them the next day.

On the same day, the children were taken from the municipal basement to the basement of the church. It was specially designed and equipped for classes with children.

For almost two months, the Children's Home was empty. Russians began actively searching for orphans in late April.

"We could not understand why the children were not there, where they had gone. We know from the guards that strangers came and asked where the children were and how they were eating," says Tetiana Karchevych, director of the Kherson Children's Home in 2015-2020.

At the end of April, a group of Russian soldiers arrived at Golgotha, but no one gave their names. The leader of the group introduced himself to Pastor Smolyakov by his call sign, "Navigator." He hid his face behind a balaclava, did not show any documents, but categorically demanded that the children be returned to the Children's Home.

In the end, the real name and position of "Navigator" were divulged by Russian propagandists themselves, who filmed a video with him and signed the man in the balaclava as Igor Kastyukevich, a State Duma member.

He will play a crucial role in this story a little later. At the same time, in the second half of April last year, more than 50 children were de facto returned to the orphanage at gunpoint.

’Navigator” has not been seen with the orphans for more than six months, although he has been appearing more and more often in propaganda videos dedicated to the occupied part of Kherson Oblast.

The first abductions

Last year, at the beginning of summer, the occupiers appointed Tetiana Zavalska as the acting director of the Children's Home. She had been working as a pediatrician at the institution for 10 years.

"Children are a sacred thing. We took them out of the conflict zone, saving their lives and health," said Vladimir Putin, "We took out entire orphanages absolutely legally. Because the heads of these orphanages were their legal representatives."

The "legal representatives" that Putin mentioned in his address are precisely the collaborators like Zavalska. From June 2022, she actually managed all the processes, gave instructions to the workers and brought in Russians to "inspect" the orphans.

Was she the "legal representative" of these children, as Putin claims? Of course not. But it was thanks to her signatures that the occupiers began to abduct the first children.

"Around 25th [April 2022], Tetiana Zavalska visited us, and with her was a woman whom she introduced as... the head of children's affairs from Moscow. When they left, Tetiana Vasylivna called that evening and demanded that I discharge the children. I refused — even though their condition was better, they could not be considered healthy yet," recalls Natalia Liutikova, head of the pediatric department of the Kherson Oblast Children's Hospital.

Zavalska's persistence was not accidental — at that time, the hospital was home to one-year-olds Illya and Marharyta, who, unlike most orphans from the Children's Home, were almost perfectly healthy.

The doctors deliberately misrepresented the diagnosis of ordinary bronchitis on the paperwork to prevent the children from being taken away. On condition of anonymity, one of the nurses told us that the same "woman from Moscow" was delighted after examining Illya and Marharyta.

In early September, Zavalska came and took the two children — first to the Children's Home, and the next day she accompanied them to Crimea. No one ever saw them again.

It was difficult to understand who exactly took these first two children. The nurses at the Children's Home did not even know the names of the women from Russia. They did not introduce themselves to the staff of the institution, and they only contacted Zavalska.

We managed to obtain an exclusive document from our own sources. On September 2, 2022, collaborator Zavalska and a representative of the occupation administration, Vadym Ilmiyev, agreed on an escort for Illya and Marharyta. Yana Valerievna Lantratova was to accompany them. She is a member of the Russian State Duma who took out Ukrainian orphans at the very beginning of the war, in 2014.

We called Lantratova under the guise of FSB agents who were investigating the details of the transfer. She denied not only the fact of her stay in Kherson, but also began to refute the authenticity of the photo from her own Telegram channel.

"Did you take two children out of Kherson last year?"

"Me? No, of course not."

"Yana Valerievna, I have a document in front of me dated September 2 and signed by Comrade Ilmiyev..."

"No, of course, I was not in Kherson then... I was in Chelyabinsk Oblast. It was an exceptional situation altogether".

Why does Yana Lantratova deny the obvious? Here's her own post from August 2022: she and Zavalska are walking around the Kherson Children's Home, talking about her parliamentary activities.

It appears she may be attempting to conceal someone's involvement. But whose? To determine this, we must examine another photo Lantratova published on August 26.

This photo was taken on the premises of the Kherson Children's Home. Lantratova is the blonde woman in black. To her right is puppet governor Volodymyr Saldo’s advisor Artish Sat. On the far left is collaborator Vadym Ilmiyev, who signed the transfer permit with Tetiana Zavalska next to him. But who is the woman in the center? She is clearly in charge here.

From our sources we obtained another exclusive document - a power of attorney identical to the one granted to Lantratova, authorizing the removal of Illya and Marharyta. This power of attorney was issued to Inna Gennadievna Varlamova, a 55-year-old resident of Moscow.

Her traces on the Internet have been carefully cleared, the only mention is her work in the Federation Council 10 years ago. She was an assistant to the first deputy head of the Russian Federation Council, Aleksandr Torshin. And even then she helped him solve issues involving children.

"You are talking such nonsense now. I have no idea what you are talking about. Where did you get this information from? It's pure nonsense," Varlamova herself responded to our questions by phone.

The number Varlamova used to communicate with us was signed as "Nina Moskva Besedka" in the phones of other users.

"Besedka” is the fifth FSB service directly responsible for the Ukrainian vector. This doesn't prove that Inna Varlamova is an FSB operative, but it does explain why Lantratova concocted so many lies.

We deliberately leave out personal information about both criminals, because such an act should be punishable without a statute of limitations.

Nevertheless, the tragedy of the Kherson orphanage did not end with the deportation of Illya and Marharyta alone.

Black Friday

On the eve of the liberation of Kherson by the Armed Forces of Ukraine in October, Igor Kastyukevich returned to the Children’s Home. The same one who had managed to get the orphans back from the church six months earlier, but remembered about them only before the Russians left the city.

At that time, there were already 48 children in the Children's Home, and the teachers were able to return the rest to their parents or relatives, as rumors had been circulating for a long time that the children might be taken to Russia.

On October 21, 2022, on a Friday that could not be called anything but black, buses, ambulances, armed Russian military, propagandists and so far unknown "volunteers from Crimea" arrived at the Children's Home. With the active complicity of collaborator Zavalska, the Russians took absolutely all the children in the direction of the temporarily occupied Crimea.

The protagonist of the crime was once again the State Duma member Igor Kastyukevich.

Charges and an international arrest warrant for Kastyukevich personally are a matter of time, because in addition to the crime of taking Kherson orphans, in March 2023, the Security Service of Ukraine has already charged him with holding a pseudo-referendum on "Kherson Oblast joining the Russian Federation."

"There is international law, there is humanitarian law, there are conventions that clearly state that an aggressor state that finds itself on another territory has no right to take and transport these children. Under no pretext! Even if, in their opinion, this may be an ‘evacuation’ or ‘rescue’," explains Mykola Kuleba, the Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights in 2014-2021. "But in reality, this is a kidnapping. What Russia is doing to children is a war crime and genocide. And we have indisputable evidence of this. All these videos and photos will be or have already been transferred to the relevant authorities, to international organizations, for the future tribunal. There, Putin and his henchmen will watch these videos and explain what they did."