Russia, the country of the lost Ukrainian children

I Want to Go Home,

by playwright Sergei Mikhalkov

was a popular 1948 play about alleged Soviet children who were torn from their families by the Third Reich and never returned.

A lesson that President Vladimir Putin, a fan of history and on whom an international arrest warrant for the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, has not taken into account for his war.

The international community demands the return of the minors to their families – Kremlin propaganda maintains without evidence that the majority are orphans – and Russian human rights defenders denounce that there is no registry where their loved ones can go to locate them.

The forced transfer of the Ukrainian children presents several aspects.

On the one hand, there are the innumerable cases of those who were interned in centers for minors that the Russians took over and whose fate is unknown.

On the other, the children who were sent by their parents to Russian territory to temporarily remove them from the war, but have not been returned when the tables turned on the front.

For example, in the areas recaptured by kyiv in Kherson and Kharkiv.

In Kozacha Lopan, a town in northern Ukraine bordering Russia, 11 of the 13 minors that the Russians took to a summer camp in August when they held this town occupied are missing.

The two who are back managed to bring their mothers, who entered Russia on an adventure that one of them, Tatiana Glagola, narrates to EL PAÍS for this report.

The mayor, Lyudmila Vakulenko, 62, writes off those who have not returned.

She knows that her parents, whom she considers "traitors to the country", ended up following in the footsteps of her children and made the leap to the neighboring country.

Kozacha Lopan reflects on the thorny and complicated reality of the deportation of children in the middle of a conflict, an act considered a war crime.

Ukraine has identified more than 16,000, but estimates that there are about 150,000, of which only about 300 have returned, according to data from the Ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets.

That has led the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant on March 17 for Putin and Russia's Ombudsman for Children, Maria Lvova-Belova.

“Everyone is against him.

But what their reaction will be, I have no idea, nobody knows," says the mayor of a town that not only borders the attacking country, but also welcomes families where passports are divided.

A question floats systematically in the environment.

Who would think of sending her daughter to camp with the authorities that have invaded you?

“There were a lot of bombings and explosions.

So we decided to send her as far as possible.

We accept that offer for ourselves.

They did not pressure us, ”says Tatiana Glagola, a 38-year-old neighbor of Kozacha Lopan, who sent her 9-year-old daughter Polina to the camp on August 28 along with the rest of the children.

The little girl was supposed to have returned on September 21, but on the 11th the counteroffensive of the local troops made kyiv expel the Russians and regain authority in the town.

The girl stayed on the other side until her mother went in person to retrieve her.

Similar situations have been experienced by other families with whom EL PAÍS has been in eastern Ukraine.

The mayor of Kozacha Lopan, Lyudmila Vakulenko, 62, in her office on March 24. Luis de Vega

Glagola, Polina's mother, is unaware of the existence of the arrest warrant against Putin.

"I have no idea.

We don't even have TV.

I am not up to date with the news ”, she affirms when asked about it.

Since she returned with her daughter on November 2, the family has been reunited in a town that was liberated but remains with just 1,500 of its more than 6,000 inhabitants.

Accustomed by now, Glagola says that the bombardments that almost daily arrive from Russia to Kozacha Lopan have not damaged her home.

As the mayor, she acknowledges that the parents of the other 11 children went to the other side of the border.

“We don't know for sure, but we have information that some are in Belgorod (a Russian city about 40 kilometers from Kozacha Lopan) because their parents make comments against Ukraine from that city through channels.

Nobody knows anything about the children in Russia

The minors deported to Russia already identified, 16,207, according to data offered in mid-February by the Ombudsman, are the tip of the iceberg, says the head of that institution, Dmytro Lubinets.

Kiev calculates that, in reality, there are 150,000 children and adolescents illegally transferred to different regions of Russia or to areas of Ukraine in which the Russian authority holds power.

In the midst of this amalgamation of statistics and confirmations that are difficult to carry out during a war, the Kiev authorities reported on March 11 that 2,161 orphaned minors had been illegally transferred out of their environment, according to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for the Reintegration of Territories. Temporarily Occupied, Irina Vereshchuk.

So far, only about 300 have been brought back, according to Lubinets.

“These have been the few successful cases so far because there was information on both sides,” says Svetlana Gánnushkina, a Russian human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize candidate.

“In Russia we know very little about the fate of children.

Ukrainians have more data because they receive information from parents and other relatives, but children here very rarely can demand to be put in touch with their own.

Many are not old enough to have their relatives' telephone numbers or to know where their grandparents are,” adds the director of the Iniciativa Ciudadana, an NGO that defends foreigners.

The opposition party of which Gánnushkina is a part, Yabloko, demands the creation of a registry of Ukrainian minors.

"For more than a year no one has known anything about what is happening with these children, where they are taken, what work is done with them, who and how many there are," denounces the founder of the group, Grigori Yavlinski.

Children from Crimea to adopt

The Russian government has a public search engine for fostering children, usynovite

(“adopt”

in Russian).

In this database, the minor can be chosen based on their characteristics, which includes, in addition to their photo and a brief description, eye color and blood group, among other features.

The registry is updated with the four Ukrainian regions illegally annexed in September last year, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, but the search does not return any results there.

Yes it does in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula occupied by Russia since 2014. There are 202 entries, many of them from recent months.

“Andrei, kind, curious, active, artist, emotional and attentive.

Member of the school choir”, says a random entry.

However, an important detail is ignored: nationality.

It is impossible to know if they are Ukrainian minors.

At the headquarters of Iniciativa Ciudadana there is a constant bustle of foreigners.

“There are dangerous things in sending these children to families,” Gannushkina warns.

“A girl who had received six Ukrainian children called me.

And she requested money to support them.

When I asked her what legal basis she had for hosting them, she told me that there was an agreement between the so-called Donetsk People's Republic and the Moscow region.

But she did not call us again because she was afraid of the legal issues that our questions raised, ”says the activist.

"What condition were they in?

There were six adopted children plus three that she already had from before.

What floor were they going to live on, even if it was for one night?” Gannushkina wonders.

Oxana, a 42-year-old Ukrainian soldier, at the time of reuniting in kyiv with her 11-year-old daughter Eva, after returning from Russia on December 17. Luis de Vega

One of the biggest problems is that of the centers for minors in the occupied territories.

"The official line of Russian propaganda talks that they are saving orphans, but in reality they are separating families," denounces Bill Van Esveld, a member of Human Rights Watch (HRW) and author of the report We have to provide a family, not rebuild orphanages

“Nine out of 10 children in these institutions have relatives.

They are not there because their parents died or abused them;

They were left there, in general, due to poverty or because the child had a handicap and they couldn't take care of him”, highlights the activist.

The Russian Ombudsman for Minors estimates that in February 2022, at the gates of war, some 2,500 minors were transferred from the Donetsk and Lugansk centers to refugee camps on Russian territory.

“This is illegal under international law, you cannot transfer civilians, and in particular children, to another place during a war or an occupation.

Just for security reasons, but it doesn't seem to have been the case on a regular basis.

That is why we think that this is a war crime,” Van Esveld stresses.

Added to the lack of a database is another problem that makes the search even more difficult.

The Russian Government expedited the granting of Russian nationality to minors to facilitate their reception by families.

"The law was changed to make them permanently adoptable, you cannot adopt children or receive aid if they have Ukrainian nationality," stresses the HRW activist.

De-Sukrainization and Russification of Minors

Fifteen of the children, originally from the Kharkov and Kherson regions of Ukraine, returned this week, the NGO Save Ukraine announced.

They had spent the last few months in what this organization describes as re-education camps.

The Yale School of Public Health has detected the presence of up to 6,000 minors in 43 facilities of this type that are part of a network not only for re-education but also for adoption that extends from the Crimea to the Russian region of Siberia, according to a published report. the 14th of February.

The investigation into the abuses not only denounces that the Russian authorities prevent family reunification, but, in some cases, even military training is given to children.

The Ombudsman for Minors of Russia boasted in a meeting with Putin held in September of the forced re-education of children so that they forget their roots.

“At first they talked bad about the [Russian] president, said all sorts of nasty things and sang the Ukrainian anthem, but then integration started,” Lvova-Belova told Putin.

According to her figures, some 380 minors had been adopted by Russian families by the end of 2022.

"If children from another nation are going to be brought to Russia, our country has to guarantee that they will receive training in their language and culture," denounces Gánnushkina, who gives as an example other Syrian minors who were temporarily welcomed by her organization. under the tutelage of Syrian adults.

"Taking children out of their environment and imposing the language and culture of another country on them is considered genocide," warns the activist.

The same opinion is shared by Human Rights Watch.

“It is a crime, that is why the Geneva Convention persecutes forcible transfer.

Some are two years old or less, they cannot be separated from their families, from their community, and they are injected with a different nationality”, denounces Van Esveld.

On the other hand, the situation in the occupied regions could be even worse.

From the Museum of Civil Voices association, founded by the Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, they point out to this newspaper that some of the adoptive families from the Donetsk and Lugansk regions —in cities like Mariupol, Rubizhne and Volnovaja— that the organization helped of the businessman have not been able to escape the area.

"And the minors have been reassigned to the local authorities of the invaders," add the same sources from the foundation.

“The phones of these adoptive families are listened to and their social networks have been blocked.

It is not safe for them to contact the representatives of Ukraine”, they conclude.

Neither Tatiana Glagola nor the other mothers consulted by EL PAÍS have warned of mistreatment during the time their children have remained in the camps.

This is how Glagola tells it: “Everything was correct, the teachers gave them clothes, shoes, a new phone... My daughter's glasses broke and they made her new ones and they took her to the doctor to check her eyesight.

My daughter hasn't told me anything bad about the camp.

They took them to classes, like at school, a couple of times a week so they wouldn't forget.

classes

”, she comments from her home in Kozacha Lopan.

“The deportation of children is a war crime,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed on Twitter on Thursday.

In her message, she informed that the EU will collaborate to make the repatriation with Ukraine and Poland effective, a territory that is usually used as a transit route to bring them back.

kyiv does not hide the fact that some of the returns are achieved thanks to direct collaboration with the Russian authorities.

Dmytro Lubinets reported on Thursday the return of two minors obtained thanks to "cooperation between the ombudsmen of Ukraine and the Russian Federation."

The casuistry varies, according to the government headed by Volodimir Zelenski, which accuses Moscow of deliberately destroying documents to prevent finding out or restoring the initial situation of these minors.

There are orphans, those whose guardianship and custody was in the hands of the State, some even disabled, accompanied by their parents or guardians, who, due to the armed conflict, have been separated from their parents or their parents have died.

Tatiana Glagola insists that, despite asking for help, no one helped her organize the trip to recover her daughter with the other mother from the town.

They first crossed all of Ukraine to the west, exited through Poland, crossed Belarus and, from there, arrived in Anapa, on the shores of the Black Sea and near the Kerch Strait that connects with the Crimean peninsula.

The Vita camp in which she says that her daughter Polina was even allows reservations to be made through different platforms.

“In 15 minutes”, she explains that they identified themselves, showed their documentation and recovered her children.

Upon entering Ukraine again days later, the border guards, upon learning of her journey, branded them as "crazy".

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