Ukrainian officials say that Russian aggression has turned thousands of Ukrainian children into hostages trapped in territories occupied by Kremlin forces. As Voice of America correspondent Anna Chernikova from Kiev reports, Ukraine is trying to return to their country the Ukrainian children that Russia has sent to re-education and adoption programs.
Since May of this year, the Ukrainian government has identified more than 19,000 children forcibly displaced from Russia. Less than 400 of them have been found and returned home
Mykola Kuleba, with the Save Ukraine charity that helps find and return Ukrainian children, tells VOA that he believes the actual number is much higher when the Russian occupation of Crimea and Donbass in 2014 is taken into account.
“There are more children like that. The figure in question is only for the last two years, but the war has been going on for ten years.”
Bohdan Shvetsov from Kherson is 14 years old. After the city fell under Russian control, the headmaster of his school, appointed by the Russian aggressor, offered the boy a two-week trip to a children’s camp in Crimea. He and many other children accepted.
Bohdan says that when the two weeks of vacation were over, the camp leaders told the children that they would not be returning home due to safety concerns.
“They told us that for security reasons you will stay in the camp, because there are bombings in your region and that they had nowhere to take us,” says the 14-year-old Ukrainian.
His mother, Iryna Shvetsova, says camp leaders told her the only way to see her son again was to go to Crimea and get him.
“The director of the camp said that the deadline to take the children was April 7 and that after that date the children remaining in the camp would be sent to different places.”
Shvetsova describes the six months of waiting for the union with her son as torture.
“I couldn’t sleep and wondered what I should do.”
Iryna found volunteers helping parents return children like Bohdan to Ukrainian-controlled territories.
“On April 7, 33 children were supposed to return, but only 32 did. One of the two sisters who were in the camp stayed there [in Crimea]. Their grandmother, who was going to pick up her granddaughters, died on the way while being interrogated by the Russians,” says Iryna Shvetsova, Bohdan’s mother.
The International Criminal Court has brought charges of war crimes against President Vladimir Putin for the illegal deportation and transfer of children.
Officials in Kiev say thousands of Ukrainian children are being held illegally in Russia or in territories occupied by Kremlin forces, away from their families who fear many may never return.
