Horror camps for captive kids
Beaten, violated at ‘ed’ sites
Kidnapped Ukrainian children are being sent to Russian “re-education” camps — where they are kept in prison-like conditions, forced to watch Russian propaganda, beaten and subjected to sexual violence, according to parents and activists.
Inessa Vertash, 43, hasn’t seen her 15-year-old son, Vitaliy, in five months — ever since he left on what was supposed to be a twoweek trip to a camp at the urging of his schoolteacher.
It was billed as a retreat to escape the fighting.
“I told her I wanted to think about it but she said there’s nothing to think about, they were leaving the next day and would get food five times a day and why would you keep him here where there are bombs and missiles?” the distressed mother told the Sunday Times.
After the two weeks were up, the teen was moved to another camp, which he likened to a prison.
Vertash told the Times that her son called her crying and described his harrowing living conditions.
“There were no sheets on the beds, they were made to wear clothes of old people, given food only fit for pigs and beaten if they didn’t sing the Russian anthem,” the mom recounted.
Even more alarmingly,
Vitaliy told his mother that Russian camp workers were forcing 13-year-old Ukrainian girls to have sex with them.
Vertash said she pleaded with her son’s headmistress to get him back but “eventually she disappeared” — and Vitaliy remains in captivity.
The mom’s harrowing tale is just one of many.
A report published by Yale University last month found that more than 6,000 Ukrainian children between the ages of 4 months and 17 years have been taken to 43 camps located
in Russia-annexed Crimea and across mainland Russia.
But the true number of kidnapped children could be many times higher.
Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine’s commissioner for children’s rights, told the Sunday Times that her office has so far documented 16,221 cases of child kidnappings by Russia — and even that is a conservative figure.
Herasymchuk suspects a few hundred thousand kids have been ripped away from their families as part of the Kremlin’s “Russification
campaign.”
Some lucky children have been rescued, thanks to the help of Save Ukraine, an organization run by Ukraine’s former children’s ombudsman, Mykola Kuleba.
Only 307 children have so far been retrieved, according to Ukraine’s commissioner for children’s rights.
Save Ukraine has rescued 164 of them, but on their last mission, their driver in Belarus was arrested, the Sunday Times reported.