How Russian officials and their collaborators spirit away Ukraine’s children
(Reuters) She was Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights. A second witness, a teen named Nastia, also identified Lvova-Belova as the visitor on that day in the early weeks of last year. Details of Lvova-Belova’s visit to the school in Henichesk and her conversation with Liza and others are reported here for the first time. The school and Lvova-Belova posted briefly about the visit on social media early last year.
“I’ve got my mother, but as far as they were concerned, I was an orphan,” Liza told Reuters several months later. “They wanted to issue a Russian passport for me and find me a family, a Russian family.”
Last March, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Lvova-Belova and her boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, on charges of illegally deporting children from Ukraine. The court said in a statement it has “reasonable grounds” to believe both bear individual criminal responsibility for acting “directly, jointly with others and/or through others” and that Putin, as president, also has command responsibility.
The ICC’s chief prosecutor said Russia transferred “at least hundreds” of children from orphanages and care homes in occupied regions of Ukraine, and “many” have been given up for adoption. Ukrainian authorities say Russia has removed more than 4,000 children who are orphaned or not in parental care.
The Kremlin and Lvova-Belova say Russia has moved children to protect them from war and that wherever possible did so with the consent of parents or guardians. A Putin spokesman denounced the ICC charges as “outrageous and unacceptable.”
Some of the missing children have been recovered. Among them is Liza, now safely back in Ukraine thanks to her mother, Oksana Halkina, who traced her to Henichesk and brought her home last May. Most accounts that have emerged of Russia’s mass movement of Ukrainian children have come from returnees like Liza.
Other children from Kherson who were living at the college in Henichesk, however, remain in Russian hands. They include Liza’s schoolmate Zorik, and Zorik’s brother Danylo, who were orphaned in 2021.
Reuters reporters have spent six months investigating the fates of missing Ukrainian children who have no relatives to advocate for them because they are orphans or are otherwise separated from their families. The stories of these children have remained largely hidden.
The Kremlin and Lvova-Belova did not respond to questions for this article.
The ICC prosecutor’s office told Reuters it is continuing to “develop multiple, interconnected lines” of investigation into the abduction of Ukrainian children. It said it cannot provide detailed comments because confidentiality is crucial to its work.
Ukrainian prosecutors told Reuters they are conducting pre-trial investigations into the illegal transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children in occupied territories and their adoption by Russian families. Further information about suspects is confidential, they said.
By interviewing dozens of witnesses to their deportations and reviewing social media and Russian news reports, Reuters has identified Zorik, Danylo and three other teens who were removed from Kherson together with Liza. All five — whose parents are dead or unable to care for them — are still in Russian-held territory with the support of the Russian state, with little prospect of returning to Ukraine.
Reuters also traced the journeys of 48 much younger orphans from Kherson, aged five years or less at the time of their removal. This group is at the heart of separate abduction charges brought by Ukrainian prosecutors against three unnamed individuals – a Russian and two Ukrainians.
Reuters tracked 46 of the cohort to two orphanages and a sanatorium in Russian-held Crimea and confirmed the group’s presence there with people involved in their care.
Two other children are now in Russia. One is Illia Vashchenko, who turns four this month. Illia was issued with a new Russian birth certificate on Sept. 26 last year by a Russian state registry office in Podolsk, near Moscow. The registry documents, which Reuters reviewed, do not reveal his precise location or whether he has been adopted.
Another is two-year-old Marharyta Prokopenko. Marharyta was adopted by Sergei Mironov, leader of a pro-Kremlin political party, and his wife Inna Varlamova, who has worked as a parliamentary aide, according to adoption papers reviewed by Reuters. Marharyta’s name has been changed to Marina Mironova, the papers show. The adoption was first reported by the BBC and Russian outlet IStories.
A spokeswoman for Mironov referred Reuters to a Telegram post in which Mironov said the report about the adoption was “fake” and part of a campaign by Ukrainian intelligence to discredit patriotic Russians.
The removals of Ukraine’s children are supported by a vast machinery to deport, house and re-educate. Reuters found that a network of pro-Kremlin actors and helpers was involved in taking the two groups of orphans from Kherson: Lvova-Belova, members of the Russian parliament, officials in Russian-occupied Crimea and Ukrainian doctors and teachers who chose to collaborate with Russian authorities.
In some cases, the children are being exploited in TV shows and in online videos for their propaganda value.
The deportations have come at an enormous human cost: siblings have been divided, vulnerable youths have been turned against each other, and preschool children – with no blood relatives to claim them – have been hidden from view in Russian-held territory. Returning these children is an arduous task, volunteers and officials in Ukraine say, and the job gets harder with every day that passes, as the children get older, and are more exposed to Russian influence.
Almost all have been “brainwashed,” said Mykola Kuleba, head of Save Ukraine, a nonprofit organisation that helps to retrieve Ukrainian children from Russiancontrolled territory. “And we will never be able to take them back. Because they hate, hate Ukraine now,” he said.
Reuters also sought comment from dozens of lowerranking Russian and Ukrainian individuals who, according to witnesses or photographic evidence, participated in the removal of children. Many of these people are in Russian-occupied Ukraine or in Russia. Most did not respond.
It’s unclear what kind of future awaits the children from Kherson. There may be some clues in the experiences of children from Ukraine’s Donetsk region that has been under Russian control since 2014.
Of the thousands of children who passed through social care facilities in the Donetsk region in this period, more than 250 have been moved to children’s institutions, foster homes or guardians in Russia and Crimea, according to a Reuters review of files obtained from the regional administrative database by a Ukrainian hacking group, Kiborg. The files contain the personal details of each child in care and cover the years 2014 to the end of 2022.
Most of the children were moved in 2022, some as far away as Murmansk, near Finland, and Noyabrsk, in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District of Siberia. Reuters verified the Donetsk data by matching a sample of children from the data to Russian media reports and local government announcements about children who had been placed in foster care.
The invasion begins
In the days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Liza was among a group of children celebrating Valentine’s Day in the Children’s Centre for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation, an orphanage on the outskirts of Kherson. In photographs, a group of teens can be seen holding red and purple flowers out of crepe paper and cards decorated with hearts.
The group included Zorik Ibrian and his older brother Danylo, two lanky teens who were pictured wolfing down a plate of snacks in a room decorated with flags, including those of Ukraine and the United States. Their two younger siblings, also living in the orphanage, played with their caregivers in another room.
Ten days later, Volodymyr Sahaidak, the director of the orphanage, saw a dark plume of smoke rising in the distance.
“My daughter called me and said, I think the war’s begun,” he said.
Russian tanks rolled down the streets of Kherson a few days later.
Sahaidak began looking for ways to shield the 52 children in his care, who ranged in age from 3 to 18. He told his staff children could play outside for 15 minutes a day, under strict rules not to scream or laugh loudly so Russian soldiers wouldn’t suspect that so many were living on site. The staff packed small backpacks for each child so they could quickly evacuate them to Ukrainian territory at the earliest opportunity.
When it became clear that Ukrainian forces were far from retaking Kherson, Sahaidak began contacting relatives of the children, begging them to take them in.
“We looked at all the documents of the children, all of whom had relatives, even those who had distant relatives. I called them myself and asked them to take the child immediately, otherwise they would be taken to Russia,” he said.
Among those who were claimed by their relatives were the two younger siblings of Zorik and Danylo. Their mother had died suddenly a year earlier and the four children had been waiting for their adult half-brother to adopt them.
In April 2022, the mother’s cousin, Oleksandr Ponomarchuk, and his wife Alla, received an urgent call from Sahaidak about the children.
“Sahaidak called us and said the situation is dire. They (Russian soldiers) are taking children from Kherson,” Oleksandr said. He and his wife, who have two children of their own, decided to take in the two younger siblings, Danyila and Imir, but told the director they couldn’t take the older boys. Russian soldiers were stopping and questioning young men in occupied Kherson, and Oleksandr told Sahaidak he was not sure if he could keep the older boys safe.
Zorik and Danylo agreed to the separation. Oleksandr assumed it would be temporary.
“We really thought our army would get rid of the occupiers faster,” he said. A few months later, Oleksandr and his wife managed to flee Kherson, taking Danyila and Imir with them to Uman in central Ukraine.
Pro-Russian officials took over the Kherson region and key posts in its schools and hospitals. A former Kherson mayor, Vladimir Saldo, was appointed governor in April. His deputy in charge of displaced people was Tetiana Kuzmich, a former teacher of Russian literature who in 2020 was detained by Ukrainian law enforcement on suspicion of spying for Russia. Ukrainian prosecutors said the case was suspended due to the full-scale invasion.
Russian soldiers began visiting the orphanage in June. One of their visits was captured on the orphanage’s CCTV camera system: Soldiers in masks carrying automatic weapons are seen walking through the corridors, accompanied by a man with a bushy beard. That man, orphanage director Sahaidak said, was Georgy Tambovtsev, newly-appointed by the Russian occupation as the deputy head of youth, family and sports. According to his social media, Tambovtsev coaches freestyle wrestling.
Tambovtsev began regularly dropping into the centre to check on the children. So did several Russian officers, their faces always covered. Sahaidak concluded the officers were from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) because they always wore masks and kept their identities hidden. Reuters could not verify whether the men were from the FSB, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.
By October 2022, Ukrainian forces were advancing steadily toward Kherson and Russian officials told thousands of residents to evacuate. Sahaidak had managed to re-home most of the orphanage’s 52 children, but not some of the teens.
Liza, Zorik, Danylo and three other teens from the orphanage, ranging in age from 15 to 17 at the time, could not be placed with relatives. They were studying at the Kherson No. 2 Vocational School when they were told by a member of the school staff they would be travelling to the seaside for two weeks of rest, Liza recalled. Employees of the school didn’t comment when approached by a Reuters reporter.
Liza, always soft-spoken and shy in large groups, believed the teachers at the school when they told her it would be a late summer vacation. “You know, I thought it was going to be summertime, guitar, singing by the beach, that sort of thing,” she said.
Instead, Liza said that she and the boys were taken by one of their teachers and other school staff 250 kilometres away to a large camp in Crimea called “Druzhba,” friendship in Russian, where they were forced to follow a strict schedule of meals and physical exercise. Any child who disobeyed or showed any allegiance to Ukraine would be threatened with a beating, Liza said.
“One thing that they taught us was that our parents won’t come to pick us up from there,” she said, reciting the message drilled into them by the camp’s directors and staff. “They won’t be able to because we’re not their children anymore.” The kids now belonged to the Russians, “and our parents don’t need us.”
Liza’s description of the Crimea camp is in line with testimonies from other repatriated children who passed through similar facilities, according to Save Ukraine.
Before retreating from Kherson, Russian soldiers ransacked Sahaidak’s office, according to Sahaidak and another member of the orphanage staff, taking with them boxes of documents for all of his children. Sahaidak is now left with a stack of hand-written note cards with basic biographical details about the children who are still in occupied territory. Drawing out a card for Zorik and Danylo, Sahaidak described their difficult upbringing in Moldova and Ukraine, and how much progress the brothers had made during their short stay at the orphanage.
“We did everything we could,” Sahaidak said, as he thumbed through his box of notes.
The darkened corridors of the orphanage are quiet now, except for the occasional boom of nearby artillery strikes. The children are long gone, and most of the staff have also fled.
Left behind in an upstairs common room was a craft project: a tree made of cardboard, with photos of the shelter’s young residents hanging like Christmas ornaments.
Five kilometres south of the orphanage, tucked behind the main thoroughfare that leads to the centre of Kherson, Ukrainians were trying to hide another group of children from the conflict.
From late February until the end of April 2022, Pastor Pavlo Smoliakov sheltered 58 toddlers and infants in the basement of his local Baptist church. The children came from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home that lies close to the Dnipro River.
Among the children in the home’s care were twin girls Diana and Svitlana Berenzon. They had been in care since birth because social workers were concerned that their family home did not have proper heating or adequate furnishing.
A few weeks before Russia invaded, social workers were finalising paperwork to return the nine-month-old sisters to their mother. She was buying clothing and other supplies in preparation. A Ukrainian social worker who was involved in the case said a local committee was due to decide on the sisters’ return on the last Thursday of February - the day Russia invaded. The meeting didn’t happen and the girls remained in care.
Soon after, Russian forces occupied Kherson.
Russian soldiers found out about the children in the church basement and began stopping by to check on them. The Russians claimed they were suspicious about what the Ukrainians intended to do with the toddlers, Pastor Smoliakov said.
At one point, a camera crew arrived to film a propaganda video about how Russian officers had thwarted a plot to traffic the children to the West. Soon afterwards, TV channel Crimea 24 aired an item that alleged there was a Ukrainian scheme to sell the children’s internal organs.
“They generally weren’t interested in the children, to tell you the truth,” Smoliakov said. “They were interested in their propaganda that these children were going to be transported to the United States for black market sales to harvest their organs.”