Ukraine’s Stolen Generation Roger Beam
Since the Russian invasion in February 2022, 19,500 children have been identified as having been deported or displaced by the Russians from their homes in the occupied territories. Those are just the ones Save Ukraine knows about — they have a name, a birth certificate, ID documents. It’s estimated there could be tens of thousands more since Russia took Crimea and part of the eastern Donbas region in 2014. Save Ukraine has managed to rescue and repatriate 1,236 children; 640 since February 2022.
Ms Kharchenko, who is also one of Save Ukraine’s Directors, said through an interpreter: “We discuss every case individually and in detail. Sometimes we have to use methods we can’t discuss in public to get the children out.
“We carefully brief the mother or close relative on what to say at every stage when they go to get their child. They are given a story, or ‘legend’, which they have to stick to when questioned by frontier guards at the borders and the airports, at checkpoints, or by the officials at the camps and institutions where the children are living.”
Save Ukraine is constantly identifying the easiest or less dangerous places to enter and leave Russia. Sometimes, at great personal risk, their own staff may accompany a group of mothers and relatives. Sympathetic drivers and organisers on the other side help. During each mission, staff at Save Ukraine maintain a 24/7 contact with the relatives, advising and holding their hands at a distance.
Since the borders between Ukraine and Russia are closed, the rescues are planned via round-about routes from Germany, the Baltic States, and other EU countries. The relatives will often fly into Russia — Moscow, for example — and then make their way by bus and car south to the occupied territories.
It’s a long and arduous journey from Ukraine, made even more stressful for the relatives who have no idea what might happen when they reach Russia or try to leave. They often encounter obstacles put in their way by aggressive officials, hours of interrogation, confiscation of documentation and their mobile phones, and even the occasional lie-detector test. The Russians will find any excuse to stop a child leaving, but even Russia cannot refuse if the relative can prove legal guardianship and the paperwork to take them away is in order down to the last comma.
The child’s mother or close relative may be living outside Ukraine, or they will have documents which says they are. It’s inadvisable to give the reason for a visit, ‘rescue of my child’. Only when they find them, and they contact the camp directors or the Russian officials responsible for the children does the mission become obvious and its purpose revealed.
If they have to, Save Ukraine will obtain false documents to cover relative and child while they are still in Russia. Then, once safely back in Ukraine, they will have to laboriously withdraw the false papers and get new ones to make things legal again.
The children in Russian camps and schools are systematically stripped of their Ukrainian roots. They have to speak Russian and sing the Russian national anthem. The curriculum is Russian, and they are constantly told how wonderful Russia is compared to Ukraine. They are subjected to the Kremlin’s view of history, culture and society. They are de-Ukrainianised or Russified.
Parents who lived in the occupied territories were either persuaded or pressured by the Russian authorities to send their children temporarily to the camps ostensibly to distance them from the fighting and give them a holiday. Some of the children were forbidden to take phones with them, they were moved from camp to camp, the dates for their return home never materialised, and the parents lost contact. Some got ill or were hospitalised without the parents knowing.
Usually, the children were promised to be returned within a specific time but each date was postponed or cancelled. For example, the return of children from Artek, a big international children’s institution with 25 educational centres in occupied Crimea, and the 300 children deported to a summer camp in Medvezhonok, where they were subjected to indoctrination, was postponed indefinitely. Hundreds of children from camps in Luchystiy and Orlenok, in the Crimea, failed to be returned to their families on the promised dates.
The children now in Russian-run orphanages have had their Ukrainian names substituted for Russian ones; they are given Russian citizenship and passports; and they are put on a fast track for adoption by families anywhere in the Russian Federation. Not all in the ‘orphans’ are devoid of parents or close relatives. They could be there because of social or economic reasons, but because they were placed in orphanages the Russian state has appointed itself their legal guardian. For the youngest, it’s likely they will lose all contact and memory of their Ukrainian identity.
Ms Kharchenko said it is almost impossible to reach these children and that is why Save Ukraine is taking DNA samples from close relatives to make identifications in the future. They are also employing facial recognition technology and AI programmes that can show ageing.
All the under eighteens are at risk, but particularly the boys. There is an official program to get them into the military once they turn eighteen and become adults. The Russian authorities like to have them educated in military academies such as the School of Future Commanders in Sevastopol founded by the military patriotic movement Yunarmiya. The boys get military training in weapons and tactics, and when old enough are offered full time military contracts and enlistment. It is an awful prospect that those who have signed up could well find themselves on the front line fighting their Ukrainian compatriots.
Reunions between mother and child are deeply emotional. The children often don’t comprehend what’s happened to them, said Ms Kharchenko, adding that they are suffering from anxiety, trauma, and in need of psychological counselling which Save Ukraine provides. Behind her desk on the wall is a sample of the therapeutic artwork a few children have produced. “They are sometimes so traumatised they cannot talk about what they have experienced. It comes out in when they draw pictures.”
Ms Kharchenko liaises with the President’s office, the Ukrainian security services, law enforcement agencies and investigators at the International Criminal Court to gather the evidence for formal indictments of President Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. They are accused of devising and implementing the abduction, displacement, indoctrination and arbitrary adoption of Ukrainian children at a time of war. Save Ukraine is providing the ICC access to the parents and children so they can take statements for evidence in a future trial in The Hague,” said Ms Kharchenko.
Warrants for the arrest of President Putin and Ms Lvova-Belova were issued in March 2023 for personally being responsible for Russia’s contraventions of the Fourth Geneva Convention. But Russia doesn’t recognise the ICC, there are no trials in absentia, and it is unlikely they will ever be brought to trial. It does prevent them travelling to countries which have signed up to the ICC where they are liable for possible arrest.
Ms Lvova-Belova has been particularly high profile in Russian policies toward Ukrainian children. She openly advocates their Ukrainian identity be remade as Russian, and has adopted a Ukrainian boy herself. In fact, children often don’t know they’ve been given a Russian identity including passport and citizenship and practically anybody can apply to be a child’s guardian.
There are many stories of how dangerous and precarious the extraction of children and youths from Russia has been. For example:
- A 17 year-old boy from Kherson who was being educated at a military academy in occupied territory desperately wanted to escape. He heard about Save Ukraine and got in touch. They worked out a ‘legend’ for him to tell the academy. He told them he wanted to visit his girlfriend in Crimea. The girl was real, but she wasn’t his girlfriend. He was instructed to go to the end of a particular street and wait for a car. The driver was working for Save Ukraine and picked him up. As they drove through checkpoints, he gave them the same story. The driver took him to the border with Russia and he crossed, eventually making his way out of the country.
Unfortunately, the driver did get into trouble with the Russian authorities and Save Ukraine had to organise for the boy to send a video saying it was his idea to make up the story and the driver knew nothing.
♦ A grandmother living in Germany asked Save Ukraine to rescue her grandson. Her health wasn’t good enough for the trip so the organisation arranged for the godmother to go instead. At Moscow’s Domodedova airport she was detained and interrogated. She was dragged from one office to another, interrogators replacing each other for hours and pressuring her to explain why she had really come to Russia. She cracked and was put on a plane to Belarus; her passport and mobile phone confiscated. She was detained in Belarus for another day and then taken to the border with Ukraine.
♦ A grandmother travelled to the Crimea to rescue a grand-daughter and her step sister who came from Kherson. She was with a group of relatives who were being interrogated individually by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The process took so long and was so stressful that after 15 hours the grandmother died of heart failure. The girls knew she was supposed to come for them and were waiting.
Permission was granted to allow another woman to get the girls but when she came to the Luchisty Camp in Yevpatoria, Crimea, she was told they weren’t there and was refused information on their whereabouts. Instead, she was told to ‘submit a request’.
Meanwhile, the Russian Children’s Rights Office decided that one of the girls was now an orphan and the state’s responsibility. They placed her with a Russian family.
♦ A mother went to rescue her son. The Russian authorities broke their promise to let her do it. Instead they held her for three days, interrogating her six hours a day. At one point she said something the FSB didn’t like and they subjected her to a lie detector test. They covered her face and she thought she was going to be shot. They kept her in a concrete, windowless cell with a can as a toilet and fed her one inedible meal a day. In the end, they did allow her to bring her son back but they made her take part in a video forcing her make derogatory remarks about Save Ukraine.
The abducted children of Ukraine were not mentioned in President Trump’s proposed peace proposals, although the Ukrainians included them in their counter proposal that they should be returned to their families without conditions and delay.
“They are not bargaining chips,” said Ms Kharchenko. “They should be released unconditionally now”.
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