Воєнні злочиниSave Ukraine brings back Ukrainian children deported to Russia. It's a struggle

Children of War, a government-run platform which gathers data about Ukrainian children who have suffered as a result of the full-scale Russian invasion, reports that nearly 19,500 children have been deported or forcibly displaced from Ukraince since 24 February 2022. Only 372 of them have been brought back. Meanwhile, human rights activists estimate that the number of deported Ukrainian children ranges between 260,000 and 700,000.

A number of different organizations are working to bring those kids back to Ukraine, including Save Ukraine, which was founded by the former Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Mykola Kuleba.

As of 1 June 2023, Save Ukraine has brought 118 children back to Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

The Village Ukraine talks to Myroslava Kharchenko, a Save Ukraine lawyer, about Russia’s efforts to obstruct and prevent the return of Ukrainian children to Ukraine, including holding their relatives prisoner for several days when they come to Russia to retrieve the children and confiscating the children’s Ukrainian documents and issuing them with Russian documents instead.

– There are lots of different organizations working to bring Ukrainian children back to Ukraine. In the absence of a single mechanism, each kid might be brought back via a different route. How does this affect your work? Does it create any difficulties?

– Parents and even the kids themselves can call our organization’s hotline and ask for help. Some of them find out about us from their friends, some from human rights groups. We try to establish direct contact with mothers or guardians, then find out where the child in question is, what conditions they’re kept in, and how they ended up in Russia. Then we put together the documents needed to bring the child back; often we have to produce copies of birth certificates and all sorts of other documents.

It’s mothers or guardians who get in touch with camp directors or Russian government officials who are tasked with housing the children brought from Ukraine. Unfortunately, we don’t have the remit to do that. They are the ones who call to check whether their child s still there and whether and how they could bring them back.

All kids from the Oleshky children’s home were deported to Russia. A woman whose child was at the home didn’t know where they were taken. We found out the child’s whereabouts through our sources, and their mom was able to pick them up. Thank God, [the Russians] gave the child back to her.

We are fortunate in that local governments help us obtain the documents that Russia requires.

– What are those documents?

– [Russian officials] delve into every detail – every word and even every punctuation mark in every document, as if they’re looking for a pretext not to let these children’s guardians retrieve them. Staff at Russian children’s homes are afraid to release the children if there are even tiny deviations from their standards.

Sometimes there are issues with retrieving children from the recently occupied territories like the city of Melitopol. Once a woman wanted to take back her younger brother, who was a minor; she was officially registered as his guardian. But the director of the facility where he was held said Russia didn’t recognize Ukrainian documents. The woman was told she had to come there and register as the boy’s guardian on the Russian-controlled territory, in accordance with the Russian law – which would require her to obtain Russian citizenship. So each situation requires a personalized approach, a new and different set of documents.

As soon as everything’s ready, the parents or legal guardians can travel to the locations where Russia is holding their kids. Often there are difficulties once the parents get there. Still, as of 1 June, we’ve helped bring back 118 children.

– Could you elaborate how the lack of a single, unified government mechanism complicates the process of bringing back the kids?

– It does affect the process of bringing back the kids. For example, once it turned out that a child was wanted by the Ukrainian law enforcement as they were crossing the Belarusian border. We should’ve been able to appeal to authorities to avoid situations like that, but we’re an NGO and not entitled to obtain such personal data. But parents, relatives, or guardians might not know about those things.

NGOs can do a lot more than government agencies to return children because Ukraine has severed diplomatic relations with Russia: our organization and others like it can usually find volunteers who can travel to the occupied territories to retrieve children.

– After being deported, Ukrainian kids are often issued Russian or Belarusian documents, since some re taken to Belarus.

– Yes, but strangely they put their citizenship down in Russian certificates as Ukrainian. How is it even possible? This initiates the process of the child obtaining Russian citizenship. There was one case, though it wasn’t our organization that handled it, when the guardians only found out their child had Russian citizenship when they were entering Ukraine; the boy himself didn’t know he had been issued it.

Russia has changed its laws in preparation for the deportation of Ukrainian children. They started by granting Putin (or, rather, Putin granting himself) the authority to determine at his discretion who is entitled to obtain Russian citizenship under a simplified procedure. These changes were adopted in 2018. In 2020, adult Ukrainians were granted this right. Later, all native Russian speakers – they just needed to pass an exam. Then, residents of the [Russian occupied territories of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts], Kharkiv Oblast, and Kherson Oblast were also allowed to obtain Russian citizenship – even without an exam.

A while ago Russian legislation also introduced a provision making it possible to establish provisional guardianship; now Russia allows these provisional guardians – and anyone can become one – to apply for citizenship on the child’s behalf under a simplified procedure. We’ve seen those cases. Say a minor was found unaccompanied by an adult in, for example, Krasnodar Krai. The person who found them can ask for provisional custody of thatis child. Provisional guardians don’t have to go through the same checks as, say, ordinary guardians: medical examination, a consultation with a narcologist and a psychiatrist, clear criminal record, in particular with respect to child sexual abuse. All these “minor details” are glossed over for provisional guardians. They just have to be “good people”.

Almost anyone can become a child’s guardian and be granted a right to enroll the child in a school, and to submit a request to obtain Russian citizenship and passport on their behalf. One girl we were able to bring back to Ukraine had her fingerprints taken as part of the citizenship process.

– Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights, has said that Russia is prepared to return Ukrainian children to Ukraine, but only if their parents come to pick them up from Russia themselves. Sometimes parents or close relatives or guardians can’t travel to Russia. The goal of Lvova-Belova’s position is clearly to create as many obstacles as possible to hinder the return of Ukrainian children. It’s likely that many of those kids won’t ever be found: they’re often moved from one institution to another or they have their adoption process accelerated.

– An elderly woman once traveled to Crimea to retrieve her granddaughter, who was under her legal guardianship, and the granddaughter’s step-sister. The girls were taken from their families in Kherson who were raising them. The woman died on her way. Her heart stopped after the Russian Federal Security Service interrogated her and a group of mothers for over 13 hours. This happened in Krasnodar Krai, at a public transport stop. The girls knew she was coming and were waiting for her…

In light of the woman’s death, the Russian Children’s Rights Office decided that the girl was now an orphan and thus the state was obligated to take care of her. Children’s service in Ukraine issued a permission for another woman to retrieve the girls, but when she came to the Luchisty (Sunny) Camp [a camp in Yevpatoriia, Crimea, where deported Ukrainian children are held - ed.], a camp employee told her the girls weren’t there. When she asked where they were, they didn’t tell her. She appealed to the Children’s Rights Office and was told to submit a request.

We found a local lawyer and appealed to every agency we could think of to establish the children’s whereabouts. Eventually the lawyer received a response that seemed to suggest, in a very roundabout way, that one of the girls was living with a Russian family in a Russian city. We’re still waiting to obtain all the documents we need to appeal the Russian government’s decision and to demand to know where she is, but for now we lost track of her. We will keep fighting to find her, but I’m not convinced we’ll succeed.

– Do you know how many Ukrainian children have been adopted in the Russian Federation?

– No, there are no numbers. The Russians are doing everything they can to hide this information. I think someone should research how many orphans were up for adoption in Russia before and after the full-scale invasion [...]. But this work is really difficult, those numbers will have to be verified, but as far as we know, the Russians in the occupied territories are destroying all data and burning documents concerning the deported children. Or, in the best case scenario, those documents are taken away together with the children.

We know where the kids from the Kherson Children’s Home are: 58 children have been taken from there, and now there’s only half of them left – the rest of them must have been adopted. Those are young kids. They will never know they are Ukrainians who were deported and illegally adopted and Russified, their [Ukrainian national] identity destroyed. Who will be there to tell them about it?

And still, we believe in our work. This work has to continue. There are databases with all the information about the orphans, including their photos. There’s software that can compile this information, so we won’t have to do it manually. Foreign intelligence can help. We have to do everything we can.

– Are there many cases of guardians going [to Russia] to retrieve their kids and being detained by Russia’s Federal Security Service? Like the case of Kherson resident Olha Hurulia who was detained in the Domodedovo airport, interrogated and then deported. She came to bring back her godson.

– This woman lived in Germany, as did the boy’s grandma. We found where he was and were looking for someone to come bring him back. The grandma’s health wasn’t great and she couldn’t travel all the way to Russia. Plus we had that experience with the elderly woman [who died in Russia]. The boy’s godmother agreed to come.

She was detained in the airport and taken somewhere where she was interrogated. Normally we explain to people traveling to Russia to retrieve their children how to behave there and what to say in different circumstances. But people are in a state of shock. She was dragged around different offices, her interrogators replaced one another and were pressuring her to tell them why she came to Russia, things like that. She said she wanted that to end as quickly as possible. In the end, she wasn’t allowed to retrieve the child. She was put on a plane to Belarus, her passport and phone were taken away from her – she was told she’d get them after the landing, but they never gave them back to her. She was held in Belarus for another day, and then taken to the Belarusian-Ukrainian border.

Obviously they made her say things on camera. She said no one asked her if she wanted to or not. In the video, I see her barely conscious, confused in her responses.

There was another similar case. A woman went to retrieve her son. They promised they’d let her do it, but they didn’t. They held her for three days, interrogating her. They didn’t like something she said, so they took her to a lie detector: armed men put a hat over her face and took her somewhere. At some point she thought she’d be shot in her head. She didn’t know where she was. She was interrogated for six hours. She slept in a prison cell in the basement, in a concrete, windowless room: wooden bunks for a bed, a jerry can for a toilet. She was given one meal a day, but she couldn’t eat it. The next day, she was again interrogated for six hours. In the end, they let her bring her son back. They were also forced to say lots of things on camera, including about our organization. The video was shared online.

People aren’t just required to say they haven’t been wronged and that they have no complaints on camera. Now the Russian Federal Security Service is forcing them to make up stories about some special sabotage operations that Save Ukraine is allegedly organizing.

– What are the prospects in terms of bringing to justice individuals involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children? Does your organization hand this information over to law enforcement officials – perhaps to the International Criminal Court, which has issued arrest warrants against Lvova-Belova and Putin for their involvement in the deportation of Ukrainian children?

– Yes, Ukraine’s Security Service and other law enforcement agencies can talk to both children that we had helped bring back from Russia, and the relatives who actually brought them back.

We are documenting these crimes: our lawyers draw up interrogation reports, which document the circumstances of the deportation and what happened to the relatives in the Russian Federation. We give these materials to the ICC – the court has an open case concerning the children, and we hope we are paving the way for the Russian leadership to be brought to account.

photo: Save Ukraine