Daunting journey into a hostile state: The Ukrainians travelling to Russia to bring deported children home

Of all the crimes Russia has committed in Ukraine during an invasion that has killed tens of thousands of people and made millions refugees, perhaps the most strange and sinister is its deportation – some call it abduction or simply theft – of thousands of children.

The Kremlin says the charge is a slur on its efforts to save young Ukrainians from war, but the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has found enough evidence to order the arrest of Russian president Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children’s rights, over their alleged role in the chilling practice.

Ukraine says some 20,000 minors have been transferred, in various ways, to Russian territory since Putin launched his all-out attack on the country in February 2022. Only about 400 have been brought home, most of them by relatives brave enough to mount rescue missions deep inside a country that is being taught, by relentless state propaganda, to hate and fear Ukrainians.

Ksenia Koldin (18) is barely an adult herself, but she knew no one else was going to look for her brother Serhiy (11) when he failed to return to Ukraine from a summer camp in Russia, and what was supposed to be a three-week trip became an absence of nine months.

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Nearly all the children taken by Russia are vulnerable. Many are orphans or lived with foster parents. Some were raised in institutions, and poverty is ubiquitous among them – they have grown up in difficult circumstances now compounded by war and occupation.

When Serhiy’s foster mother in Ukraine did not collect Serhiy from the camp, a Russian woman took him in and began to make arrangements for him to remain in her country

The Koldins’ biological mother could not look after them and they were placed in foster care, and were living in the town of Vovchansk in eastern Ukraine when Russian troops occupied that part of the Kharkiv region last year.

Serhiy was sent to a camp last August in the Krasnodar province of southern Russia, close to the Crimea peninsula on the Black Sea that Putin annexed from Ukraine in 2014. He was still there when Ukrainian troops liberated Vovchansk in September.

When Serhiy’s foster mother in Ukraine did not collect Serhiy from the camp, a Russian woman took him in and began to make arrangements for him to remain in her country, regardless of his Ukrainian citizenship and his sister’s desire to bring him home.

‘Harder to contact’

“I was in touch with him at the camp and when he was taken to the town of Yeisk, but as time went by it became harder and harder to contact him. This woman either didn’t answer the phone or said Serhiy couldn’t talk to me,” Ksenia says.

“I rang and rang, and then texted him saying that if he couldn’t talk to me then at least he should send a message telling me if he was okay. Then by chance I got him on the phone, and he told me he’d been moved to yet another place,” she recalls.

“I asked the woman why she hadn’t told me, and she just said there was no time. She said she knew no one was going to come for Serhiy and that she wanted to take him.”

Ksenia insisted that her brother should be with her, to which the woman said they would have to decide Serhiy’s future through the Russian social services.

Essentially alone and barely out of school, Ksenia set about winning approval to bring her only sibling back to Ukraine from the enemy state that is trying to destroy it.

“He is the closest person I have, and until this happened we were always together,” she explains. “When we lived with our mother before she lost the right to look after us, I told Serhiy that whatever happens to us, I will always be with you. That no matter what, I’ll never abandon you.”

As Ksenia sought the required documents from the Ukrainian social services, word of her situation reached Save Ukraine, a Kyiv-based organisation that has brought 118 children back from Russia since the start of all-out war between the neighbours.

Save Ukraine helped her gather the paperwork and translated it into Russian, and when the Krasnodar social services said they were satisfied that Ksenia had a right to take back her brother, the group found Russian volunteers to drive her the 1,000km to collect him.

‘Really scared’

“I was really scared that they wouldn’t give him back,” she says. “But I promised myself that I would take him with me and I would not leave Russia without him. I went to Krasnodar with a kind of crazy confidence that I could do it, even if it might not be easy and there would be obstacles; compared to that determination, the fear was small.”

They would say things like, ‘There’s war in Ukraine, why would you go back there?’ and that ‘Everything here is good’ and ‘Soon Ukraine will be part of Russia anyway’

—  Ksenia Koldin, on what her 11-year-old brother was told

She was at the social services office in the town of Abinsk, documents in hand, when it opened at 8am on May 18th. But her trepidation grew when Serhiy’s Russian “foster mother” brought him in, and he barely acknowledged his sister and seemed oddly quiet and withdrawn. He had told her on the phone that he wanted to return to Ukraine, but now said he did not want to go.

She was allowed to spend some time alone with her brother, and it was enough to convince him to go with her. That afternoon they began the long journey home to Ukraine.

“Serhiy says they didn’t mistreat him physically, but they were so pro-Russian that there was lots of pressure. They would say things like, ‘There’s war in Ukraine, why would you go back there?’ and that ‘Everything here is good’ and ‘Soon Ukraine will be part of Russia anyway’. And all the usual stuff about Ukraine being full of Nazis and fascists.

“I think he’s changed a lot. We were very warm before but now he’s quite closed and sometimes he has a go at me. He’s even said that it would have been better if I hadn’t brought him back. But I don’t pay attention to that – those people promised him a lot and really worked on him to make him stay in Russia. He needs time and a period of adaptation.”

Now they are living in a Kyiv hostel where Save Ukraine provides accommodation and assistance to children returning from Russia and their relatives.

Olga Yerokhina, a spokeswoman for Save Ukraine, says: “If you are a child from a vulnerable background and you are offered all these good conditions – money, an apartment in the future and other things – then it’s understandable that you might think it’s better to stay there. It’s easy to manipulate children like this.

“Many children who come back say they were forced to learn Russia’s language and history and were told about ‘Great Russia’, and how Ukraine is not a state, and that Ukraine doesn’t want you and your parents don’t need you,” she adds.

Brainwashed

“Through ‘re-education’ you could easily make them ‘Russian’ kids. You don’t need to kill them, you just take them and brainwash them. It’s part of the Russian strategy for this whole war – they want to erase the Ukrainian nation… They want our land and resources and our children too, as part of one big goal.”

A study published by Yale University in February stated that Russia was “operating a large-scale, systematic network of camps and other facilities that has held at least 6,000 children from Ukraine”. It identified 43 facilities that were part of this network, which had several roles including the “re-education” of children to make them “more pro-Russia in their personal and political views.”

Moscow officials, including Lvova-Belova – who adopted a teenager from Mariupol in Ukraine’s Donbas area, which was devastated by Russia’s occupation – deny such claims and describe the movement of children to their country as a grand humanitarian gesture.

The ICC arrest warrants made the Kremlin highly sensitive over the issue, however, and Putin was quick to address it when raised by a delegation of African leaders last week.

[ Ukraine war: More than 30 children reunited with their families ]

“Children are a sacred priority. We evacuated them from the conflict zone, saving their lives and protecting their health,” he said. “No one was going to separate them from their families. We evacuated entire orphanages… We were never against the reunion of children with their families, if, of course, their relatives turn up.”

Many young Ukrainians are moved between camps and other locations, making it harder for relatives to “turn up” at the right place before the children are entered into the Russian care system and given to foster or adoptive parents somewhere in the vast country.

Taken to Crimea

Veronika Tsymbolar thinks her eight-year-old daughter Marharyta could have been in that system now, and perhaps lost to her forever, had she not gone to occupied Crimea to retrieve her in February.

Veronika says she thought Marharyta was living with her father in the partly occupied Kherson region of southeastern Ukraine last autumn, when Kyiv’s forces began retaking swathes of the area and she decided to evacuate her to a safer part of the country.

She discovered that Marharyta was actually missing, having befriended a girl whose pro-Russian mother had fled with her deeper into Moscow-controlled territory.

If Save Ukraine hadn’t gone with me to Russia, I might not have been brave enough to do it myself

—  Veronika Tsymbolar, on rescuing her daughter

Through online appeals for information, Veronika found that her daughter had been taken to Feodosiya in Crimea, and she was put in contact with Save Ukraine, which in February included her in one of seven trips it has organised for women to travel to Russia to bring children home.

“If Save Ukraine hadn’t gone with me to Russia, I might not have been brave enough to do it myself. The journey was hard and frightening. It took a week in each direction and we had to go through so many checkpoints, travelling through Poland and Belarus and Russia to get to Crimea. The Russians checked our phones, so we had to delete anything that could have made them angry,” Veronika says.

“Thankfully, when we got to Feodosiya they let Marharyta go. She burst into tears and almost knocked me off my feet when we saw each other again,” she recalls. “When I raise the subject now she won’t talk about it at all, she completely closes up… I don’t know if this will have a long-term effect on her. But I think she was damaged by this psychologically.”

‘I’d strangle him’

The ICC arrest order gives Veronika hope that Putin might have to answer for Russian crimes committed in Ukraine: “Of course,” she says. “I’d strangle him myself if I could.”

Yet Lvova-Belova in particular seems blithely unaware of how her “good deeds” are perceived by the outside world, often naming local administrations and Russian officials that enabled the transfer of Ukrainian children, and thanking Putin personally at a Kremlin meeting for helping her adopt a teenager from occupied Mariupol.

“Now I know what it means to be a mother of a child from Donbas – it is a difficult job but we love each other, that is for sure,” she told Putin. “And of course, it is scary to hear when they tell you, especially in Mariupol, how Ukrainian troops were shooting people in the back and how children shielded their brothers and sisters with their bodies.”

[ ‘I just want them back’: Ukrainian civilians tell of torture and legal limbo in Russian captivity ]

Anastasiya Pantelieieva of the Kyiv-based Media Initiative for Human Rights, which investigates Russia’s abuses, thinks a mix of motivations is behind its treatment of Ukrainian children: it is part propaganda project, part attempt to erase Ukrainian identity; some Russians may believe they are helping, and some may desperately want a child; perhaps it is also a twisted attempt to ease deep-seated guilt over Russia’s role as invader, occupier and destroyer in Ukraine.

“It also shows they do not know any international laws and live in some parallel reality,” Pantelieieva says. “Probably they think everything is okay and there is no international law for Russians.”

Save Ukraine says that when parents travel to Russia to take children home, they usually succeed. But it is a daunting journey to a hostile state, and it is only getting harder: on the organisation’s mission in May, a woman who was trying to retrieve her godson was deported to Belarus, and Moscow accused the group of working for Kyiv’s security services.

Through her perseverance, Ksenia succeeded in bringing Serhiy back to Ukraine on that trip. Now she can think about where and what she wants to study, and which job she might like to do – matters closer to the concerns of most 18-year-old European.

“Lvova-Belova says they are ‘saving children’ but really they’re just luring kids from occupied territory and trying to take make them their own. I don’t really understand what they’re trying to do, but the result is that lots of children are ending up without their parents in that horrible country,” she says.

“It was very scary and now it seems like a kind of miracle that Serhiy came back. But I was going to do it no matter what. He doesn’t need to thank me because it was my idea, though I do give myself a ‘tick’ for managing to do this. He might not seem very grateful now, but I hope that in time he will understand.”