One year ago Russia invaded Ukraine, exposing thousands of innocent children to the brutal reality of war. As the conflict continues, World Vision is helping local charities provide mental and emotional support to the children living through this.
Video / NZ Herald / World Vision
Russian authorities are beating Ukrainian children as they attempt to “re-educate them”, according to one of more than a dozen teenagers freed from Moscow-run youth facilities after months of negotiation.
The parents of more than a dozen children transported to a youth camp on the Black Sea peninsula last year brought them back to Ukraine, the charity that organised the evacuation confirmed.
The children, mostly teenagers, were living in Russia-occupied area of the Kherson and Kharkiv regions when local education authorities suggested sending them to a summer camp in Crimea, which has been controlled by Russia since 2014.
But those operating the camp refused to send them back to their parents when their hometowns were liberated by Ukraine.
A woman walks by a building destroyed by a Russian strike in Kupiansk, Ukraine. Photo / AP
Save Ukraine, the charity that organised the evacuation, said it helped some parents to travel to Crimea, via Poland, Belarus and Russia to retrieve their children. Parents and children were seen hugging and kissing as they arrived in Kyiv. Some of the children were seeing their families for the first time in months.
One boy spoke of his mistreatment during a television interview.
The teenager, who was not identified, said children from Kherson were punished for expressing pro-Ukrainian views.
”We will take you to an orphanage, you will sit there and understand everything,” the boy said a security officer had told him and other teenagers.
He also said he saw a bruise on the back of a teenage girl that had been caused by a stick used by the officer to beat them.
The boy added that the camp’s director had told him his parents had given him up for adoption. Distraught, he called his mother, who called camp officials to tell them she had done no such thing. However, administrators allegedly told her: “You’re not going to take them anyway. They will be children of Russia.”
The repatriation was carried out less than a week after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s children’s rights ombudsman, over the country’s suspected involvement in the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine’s occupied territories.
Putin has not commented on the allegations. Lvova-Belova earlier this week defended the “evacuation” of Ukrainian children and claiming that no parents had demanded the return of their children.
The Ukrainian government says more than 16,000 children have been deported to Russia from the occupied territories, while a study by Yale University in the US has identified 43 facilities that are holding some 6000 children, aged four months to 17 years. Some of their numbers have been sent to orphanages, put into foster care, or offered for adoption, ostensibly after losing or becoming separated from their parents during the invasion.
Lvova-Belova last month said she herself had adopted a 15-year-old boy from Mariupol.
An apartment building explodes after Russian army tank fire in Mariupol, Ukraine. Photo / AP
Others, including most of those repatriated, were told they were going to summer camps in Russia and Crimea for a few weeks but became trapped when the battle lines moved and their homes were liberated by Ukraine.
Denis, the father of a teenage girl and a young boy, told Ukraine’s Kanal 5 television station, which was formerly owned by businessman Petro Poroshenko, the fifth president of Ukraine, that the head teacher of their school in Kherson had assured him that his children would be safe when he sent the pair off to a youth camp in Crimea. “We waited for six-and-a-half months - and now they’re here,” he said.
Russia has defended what it calls evacuating children to safety. But those who returned to Ukraine have spoken about the attempts to re-educate them. At some camps, they were forced to learn by heart and sing the Russian national anthem and taught that Ukraine was part of Russia.
Some parents who willingly sent their children to youth camps in Crimea or Russia were hesitant to admit their plight, fearing that they would be perceived as having pro-Russia sympathies. One family from the Kharkiv region said they had agreed to send their daughter to a summer camp in Krasnodar, in southern Russia, to keep her safe after a shell hit a nearby house.
To make matters worse, the collaborating official who organised the trip fled with the documentation and contact details of the camp in question, making it difficult to track her down. But in other cases, Russian authorities had no such excuse.
”All the mothers at the school signed up. Probably, I could have said no, but the teachers kept saying that all kids are going, it is for free, and she will come back in two weeks,” Tetiana Vlaiko, 36-year-old from Kherson region told WhoWhatWhy, a not-for-profit newsite, last month.
Orphaned children sleep inside cribs at the children's regional hospital maternity ward in Kherson. Photo / AP
Her daughter, Lilia, should have returned on October 21 - when Kherson remained under Russian control - but never arrived.
Eventually, when the head teacher said that the children were not coming back, she “was full of guilt”, she told the site, and “should never have told her she could go”.
