Abandoned in the wilds of Russia. How children were kidnapped from an orphanage in Kherson

Olena Pavlivna is the director of an institution without children. Almost all of them were taken over by the Russians under the guise of evacuation in October 2022, and some were secretly taken away.

The fate of each child is now the material of a war crimes trial. Meanwhile, Ukraine, with great efforts, finds and returns the child.

 

The road to oblivion

 

At the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, 63 residents of the orphanage could not be sheltered from the occupation. Fleeing from the shelling, the children were hidden in the basement of the church.

"We were looking for the children's relatives and we allowed them to take all the children for whom it was possible, realizing that sooner or later the Russians would find us, and we didn't know what would happen next," says Olena Ovchinnikova, ward nurse.

During their stay in the church, 10 children were handed over to their parents and relatives.

The Deputy Speaker of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, Ihor Kastyukevich, came to the church with a weapon at the end of April 2022.

"Are there any children?" asked the foreigners with balaclavas on their heads in Russian. There were children.

Lyudmila Afanasyeva, an eyewitness to the event and a former teacher at the orphanage, personally met with Kastjukevich.

"The soldiers ransacked all the rooms. And their chief, who later turned out to be Kasyukevich, grumbled so disgustingly: "But who needs these underdeveloped people...".

The woman says that according to his orders, everyone was returned from the church to the two-story building of the institution without shelter.

 

More than a hundred workers worked in the orphanage. After the invasion, some evacuated, others simply broke free and waited in the city. But most stayed to work with children.

 

Kornienko was gradually dispossessed of her duties as director, and in her place the occupation administration appointed a local pediatrician, Tetiana Zavalska, who was very sympathetic to the "Russian world".

 

"From time to time, various people visited the children, these Russians, with masks and weapons. They asked the children their names, if they had brothers and sisters. Why? That's how we survived until autumn, and on October 21, under the command of Zavalska, all the children were taken from the orphanage by bus," recalls nurse Ljubov Saiko.

Together with the children, the Russians took everything, personal files of children and staff, medical and administrative documentation. The data on the computers was deleted, and the occupiers managed to intimidate many witnesses before leaving.

After the de-occupation of Kherson, Ukrainian police officers had to focus on investigating cases of torture and murder, finding collaborators and taking Kherson children to camps for so-called holidays.

According to Ukrainian police, there were more than 1,500 children who were separated from their parents because they were not returned from Crimea to Kherson. Such forcibly displaced children are called "parental children", because their relatives contacted the police officers, and they handed the children over to the wanted group.

The return process began with the participation of the parents. So these cases, issues of prisoners of war and missing persons remained in the center of attention of the central authorities.

At that time, no one was looking for children from orphanages. Added to all this is the bureaucratic chaos of the local children's service.

"We simply had no photos of the children from the orphanage, no information about their parents or relatives, no framework for the crime," said one of the investigators in the orphanage case, whose name is being withheld for security reasons. "This and other similar cases were given the status of "particularly important", but we still had a catastrophic lack of human resources. Little by little we collected some valuable data".

 

Russian demands

 

After the publication of the warrant for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children's rights Maria Lvova-Belova, representatives of the International Criminal Court were preparing to open an office in Kiev, and the Ukrainian investigation recorded hundreds of cases of deportation.

It was established that the following took part in the removal of 46 residents from Kherson on October 21, 2022: Jaroslav Reznikov, an associate of the security forces of the Russian Federation, the so-called Deputy Minister of Health of Crimea Anton Lyaskovski, Deputy Director of the orphanage in Simferopol "Ilochka" Margarita Suslova and many others. However, there was not enough evidence for the court about the guilt of certain persons.

It should be noted that a total of 50 children were taken from the orphanage in an unknown direction.

According to many witnesses, in addition to the ten children who were given to relatives in Kherson at the beginning of the occupation, three more children with special needs remained in the regional hospital in Kherson.

On October 21, 2022, the Russians took 46 children, on the same day two children were handed over to unknown persons, and in September 2022, two more children were kidnapped.

In June 2023, the SBU reported suspicions of Russian State Duma deputy Ihor Kastyukevich, so-called orphanage director Tetyana Zavalskaya, and occupation official Vadim Ilmiyev in connection with the deportation of Ukrainian children to the Russian Federation and direct participation in the relocation of children to Crimea. These were the first suspicions from Ukraine in the general deportation procedure.

Ukrainian investigators and international partners visited Kherson. Among their tasks, in particular, was the questioning of witnesses in order to identify all those involved in the crime of taking children from the orphanage.

"In accordance with international legal norms, one of our challenges was to document evidence or denial of a real military threat and the need to evacuate children for security reasons. We found evidence that there is no legal basis for taking children from orphanages to Russia," noted the head of the office. for the interests of children and suppression of violence of the Office of the Chief Prosecutor Janin Tertična.

 

Most of the residents of the orphanage, together with Zavalski, were sent to the institutions "Iločka" and "Opuški" in Simferopol.

 

Another question arose: how to recognize children in the future who grow and change their appearance? Therefore, it was necessary to collect and preserve biological samples of the children's closest relatives.

During 2023, information came from various sources that several wards from Simferopol were taken by relatives living in the Russian Federation.

According to Article 74 of the "Additional Protocol" with the "1987 Commentary on the Additional Protocol" to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, the family is not only considered relatives in the direct line of kinship (by descent or law), but all those who they consider each other family members through cooperation or emotional ties.

Therefore, the responsibility for the child can be assumed by cousins, sisters, uncles and aunts, as well as non-relatives, such as stepfathers, etc. But Russia set other conditions for Ukraine: the children will be returned only to blood relatives, and the relationship must be documented, the documents must be translated into Russian, and the relatives must personally come to pick up the child.

 

Ukrainian director Olena Kornienko remains the official guardian of all the children of the institution in Kherson. But Russia does not agree to return the children to the hands of the Ukrainian representative. One of the reasons is the existence of a Russian legal entity, a children's home with a Russian head of the institution, who is the guardian of the children according to the laws of the Russian Federation.

Unlike the process of returning a child who has parents to Ukraine, the options for the wards of the Kherson Children's Home were limited.

Every child who ended up in a state institution had some difficulties with his family. Some had difficult life circumstances, some had serious illnesses of both parents, and some were deprived of parental care due to their parents' alcoholism.

 

The most difficult were the cases in which the process of deprivation of parental care was interrupted by the war, for example, when the trial took place on the left bank, or the court did not have time to enter the decision in the registry books because of the invasion. Then the child is "stuck" in a legal vacuum.

 

It was impossible to register the guardianship of a child who was not deprived of care, and it was also impossible to take the child away if the parents were interested in him. That's how some children ended up in the Kremlin's legal trap.

In general, Ukraine faced another task: to find parents or blood relatives who would agree to issue the necessary documents and go to Crimea to collect the children. Due to the war and the occupation of the left bank, where more than half of the children from the orphanage come from, the task was extremely difficult.

 

  Seven rescued children

 

Actions related to children's personal data, especially those taken care of by the state, have traditionally been accompanied by a large bureaucracy.

Because of the war, a lot of information was lost, which was only on paper in the offices of the local administration of the Kherson region. Despite this, the collection of data on the relatives of the children of the orphanage continued. We were able to identify many relatives who gave their biological samples and agreed to take the children.

The first meeting with Volodymyr Berenzon stunned the man. He was informed that they had been looking for him for six months and said: "Take the nephews for yourself, but first you need to go to the Crimea for them".

Volodymyr knew that his own brother and the father of the children died from Russian shelling in December 2022. The man knew he had little nieces, but he had never seen them and had no idea of their fate. After seeing the photo of the girls, which was taken in the occupation before leaving the church, the husband and wife decided: "Of course we will take them."

In February 2024, Volodymyr's wife went to Moscow. The employees of the Lviv-Belov Office brought the children there from "Iločka" with the mediation of Qatar. It is worth noting here that according to international humanitarian law, the return of deportation victims does not exclude criminal responsibility and is not a legal justification for criminals.

In Simferopol, Russian extracts from the birth register were made for these and all other residents of the orphanage. The Russians also dismissed the "director" of the Kherson children's home under occupation. Instead of Zavalska, this function is performed by Andrej Halevin, who before his appointment was in charge of the funeral society, which also takes care of green areas.

The reunited Berenzon family is the result of the hard work of many institutions.

"I can't recover from this shock, the girls are so close to us, we are absolutely happy," says Volodymyr a few days after meeting the children.

Olga, who returned her son Victor in October 2023, Victoria, who recently brought a son and daughter, and Elena's two three-year-old daughters, who returned in March, are already finished stories. Unlike the stories about Ilya and Margarita, who were taken from the orphanage separately from other children under mysterious circumstances.

 

Adoption in the Kremlin

 

On September 2, 2022, at nine in the morning, three stocky armed men with balaclavas on their heads arrived at the orphanage in Kherson in a black SUV with no license plates. They took ten-month-old Margarita Prokopenko and one-and-a-half-year-old Ilya Vashchenko.

A joint investigation by the BBC and "Important Histories" in late 2023 told the world that both children were taken by a Russian woman, Ina Varlamova, who planned and carried out the abduction.

Shortly after the abduction, Varlamova registered her marriage with the head of the "Just Russia" party, Serhiy Mironov, with which the newly married couple of pensioners officially adopted Margarita, changing her name.

Perhaps the Russians hoped that no one would look for the girl, because during the occupation she was deprived of parental care, her father died, and her biological mother leads an antisocial life. However, Margarita has relatives in Ukraine.

On March 19, 2024, the SBU filed a complaint in absentia against Yana Lantrov, a member of the Russian State Duma and one of Mironov's close associates, who directly participated in the September kidnapping along with Varlamova.

Ilya Vashchenko also has a cousin. It was not possible to find evidence of the adoption of this child by the Russians, only a Russian birth certificate.

Perhaps because Ukraine did not have time to deprive Ilya's parents of their parental rights - this legal process was underway at the beginning of the invasion. Officially, the bureaucracy does not allow the adoption of a parent's child, even according to the laws of the Russian Federation.

At the moment, it is not known where they are, nor what is the state of health of these children.

On February 23, the USA and the EU imposed sanctions on Varlamova, and Ukraine and the International Criminal Court are preparing many more surprises for the Russians, so the story about the emptied orphanage in Kherson continues.