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When Ukrainian forces pushed into Kherson last fall in an attempt to wrest the region from Russian control, parents were pressured by local Russian officials to send their children to Russian-controlled Crimea, where they said it would be safer to stay at a summer camp.
The family told CBC News they were promised a short break at sea would be good for the children.
Some parents were even told they would be back in a few weeks.
But the reunion took almost half a year.
“It’s not a summer camp, it’s a trick,” said Mykola Kuleba, the founder Save Ukrainefoundation that helped bring 17 children back to Kyiv on Wednesday.
The foundation financed and organized a trip that took the children’s mother on a 10-day trip through Poland, Belarus and Russia. Save Ukraine made sure the group had all the proper documents for the trip and made sure they were prepared for any questions the Russian authorities might ask.
The small group is part of what Ukraine says is a mass deportation of more than 16,000 of its children and is part of what investigators seea war crimes effort to “re-educate” them with pro-Russian views.
Earlier this month, on March 17, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s children’s commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for the illegal deportation and transfer of children.
Kremlin officials and Lvova-Belova dismissed the allegations as “nonsense”.
A Russian foreign ministry spokesman even suggested that as head of state, Putin has immunity from prosecution.
Experts suspect the real number of Ukrainian children sent to Russia and its occupied territories is much higher. It includes people with medical conditions living in group homes and orphanages, as well as people separated from their parents by war.
Other children, like most of those who returned to Kyiv this week, were sent to Crimea after their parents were reportedly pressured by Russian authorities.
Stranded in Crimea
Denis Zaporozhchenko said the teacher at his children’s school asked him and his wife to send their three children, the youngest 10, to Yevpatoria in Crimea, where they would live in a camp.
But after they left, he said they realized they made a mistake.
“We were just left devastated,” he said in an interview at the reception center after meeting his daughter and two sons.
He and other parents and children spoke to a freelance crew working for CBC News.
Zaporozhchenko can’t travel to Russian-occupied Crimea because most men are banned from leaving the country, so she only sees her children when she’s back in Kyiv.
He and his wife plan to bring him back to Kherson later this week.
He said that while he was in Crimea, he was able to communicate with his children by phone and share photos through messaging apps. They said they were being fed and given warm clothes.
In the camp, there is a school, including classes in Russian, English and mathematics. There are also events organized for children, such as concerts and dances.
While at least one of the 17 children said they were conflicted about returning to Ukraine, as Crimea seemed safer, others said they did not like being away from their parents.
Vitaliy Vertash was sent to the same camp, but he told CBC News that he ran away from there along with other children. He said police picked him up two days later, and officers confiscated his phone.
Another boy Maxim, 12, said he was often cursed by camp leaders and some children were stolen.
Natalia Zhornyk said when her 15-year-old son Artem refused to sing the national anthem, she was threatened with being sent to an asylum or adopted.
Unlike most of the children in the group, he was from a village in the Kharkiv region, and was sent by Russian soldiers to a boarding school in the Russian-held region of Luhansk.
He had separated from his parents after high school in Kupiansk to pick up some documents, but after he arrived, Russian forces closed all the doors to the city.
Eventually, the director of the boarding school where Artem was taken, got in touch with Zhornyk to tell him where he was.
He said that they had no way of taking him, because he did not have a foreign passport that prevented him from going to Russia before.
Zhornyk said that when he heard that the ICC had issued a warrant for Putin, he was happy but wanted more.
“I want him sent to a penal colony,” he said. “I want him to suffer.”
The most vulnerable
When the children and their parents were towed to Kyiv on Wednesday, they all got out of the van except for 16-year-old Sasha, who has severe autism as her mother Olga Mazur said there were many people waiting for the cameras, too many.
He has lived in a group home since the age of nine, when his behavior and frequent outbursts became too much for his parents to handle.
Mazur said he often visits her at his home in the community of Oleshky, south of the Dnipro river, but COVID-19 has made visits more difficult. When the war started, it became almost impossible.
Civil convoy in Kherson is often attacked and the main bridge to Oleshky, the Antonivsky bridge, is controlled by Russian forces and has targeted by Ukraine for trying to retake the area.
In October, Russian officials moved Sasha and about two dozen other children, many of them in wheelchairs, to a special boarding school in Crimea, but Mazur said they were never informed.
He only found out where his son was, after reading a post on social media by the Russian administration installed in Oleshky, which was sent about moving the children to Russia where they would receive medical treatment.
Mazur got in touch with Save Ukraine which helped him travel to Crimea to reunite with his son.
“He immediately recognized me and came to me,” she said.
Mazur said he learned that his son developed bedsores at home in Oleshky during the Russian occupation.
He believes that there are not enough staff to care for the children because many leave because it is too dangerous.
“If my son suffered so much, I can’t imagine what happened to the other children out there, especially those in wheelchairs,” Mazur said. “They all need to get back from there. And the sooner the better.”
‘re-education’ camp
It is not known how many children have been sent to Russia and its occupied territories, as well as how many have been adopted. Russian officials have posted information and even posted a video of a ceremony where some children have been granted Russian citizenship.
Last month, researchers at the Yale School of Public Health released report check Dozens of facilities that have been sent to children, most of which are used as camps.
He first listed 43 sites, including a couple located in Siberia, and others in eastern Russia.
“We think that both facilities are specifically involved in military training for boys, 14 to 17 years old,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a war crimes investigator and head of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
He told CBC News that since publishing the report, his team is investigating an additional two to three dozen locations that are also suspected of being destinations for children deported from Ukraine.
He said that while most of the camps he has confirmed are linked to Russia’s “re-education” program, the two sites are specifically linked to the adoption program.
Raymond said this is now a “golden hour” for family reunification because it will become more difficult to trace children and find documentation when they pass.
“It’s great that the ICC is indicted, but I won’t be happy until those kids come home,” he said.
Raymond described the warrants issued by the ICC as conservative but smart, saying he believed it would be easy to prosecute Putin and Lvova-Belova because Russia had sent them about the children they took.
in response to Russia
Lvova-Belova made the accusation and posted on her Telegram social media account that she was “happy that the international community appreciates our work to protect children,” saying that she surrounds them with care and love.
He told state media that Russia does not just “leave children in war zones, and wants to give them a chance to live a normal life.”
Evgeny Popov, host of state television and MP in the Russian State Duma said BBC News last week that Russia rescued the children and has yet to receive requests from relatives for the children’s return.
Mykola Kubela, the founder of Save Ukraine, was outraged by Russia’s attempt to make this an evacuation.
“It’s like someone came to my house, cut off my wing and made me bleed, and said, ‘Oh, I helped you. I saved you.’
Kubela’s group has now organized four trips for parents to pick up their children and part of their work is preparing parents for possible checks by Russia’s security service, the FSB.
He said he has seen overwhelming evidence of Russia trying to brainwash children in an effort to erase their Ukrainian identity. He said that all the families who have returned are now receiving social and psychological support.
“[Russia] has no right as an aggressor to touch any family – children. It’s a war crime.”
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