How Ukrainian children live in Russia and how Ukraine is returning them home

Fourteen-year-old Kostyantyn lived in the village of Kozatske in the Kherson region with his older sisters and his father, who needed constant care due to his illness. The Russian army occupied the village at the beginning of the full-scale invasion in late February 2022. When the boy left his home for humanitarian aid, his relatives evacuated to Nova Kakhovka, also occupied, but without active hostilities. "I returned home - and my family is gone," Kostya says in an interview with DW. "Apparently, there was no room on the bus," the boy tries to understand and justify his relatives.

For the next few months, he lived alone. "They couldn't come for me. I don't know why. I was a little upset about it," Kostya admits.

In the summer, representatives of the occupation administration offered him to go to the camp in Gelendzhik, Russia. He left and returned home after a ten-day shift. In two months, he was again offered to go to the Russian camp, now in Anapa.

“It was an evacuation,” Kostya believes. Soon, the Ukrainian army liberated part of the Kherson region, including the village where the boy lived. When the shift in the camp ended, the children were placed in compact housing units for refugees from Ukraine.

Thus, Kostya ended up among the 19,500 children, according to the Ukrainian authorities, illegally deported to the Russian Federation and the occupied territories. As Darya Gerasimchuk, the Ukrainian presidential commissioner for children's rights, explained to DW, this official figure even includes those children who went to the Russian Federation with their parents. After all, the Russian army created the conditions under which the families were forced to take this step, Gerasimchuk emphasizes.

The new Russian family of the Ukrainian boy

When Kostya lived in a refugee hotel in Anapa, representatives of the Russian guardianship authorities visited him. According to the boy, they said that they would take him to an orphanage if someone from his family did not come to pick him up. But Kostya had no contact with his family. He eventually managed to contact his sister. "I tell her: do something, get me out of here," the boy recalls. But the sister could not come, because she was underage.

Soon, the employee of the guardianship authority said that she had found adoptive parents for Kostya in the suburbs of Anapa. The boy did not want another family, but in the end he agreed to go to her.

"The family is good," says the boy, "I've never seen such happy parents."

The adoptive parents are Ukrainians from Donetsk. After the occupation in 2014, they moved to the Russian Federation and probably received Russian citizenship.

"They said they were Ukrainians. They had the flag and coat of arms of Ukraine. Well, there was also the Russian coat of arms, because they are still in Russia," says Kostya.

 

He became their third adopted child. The boy went to a new school, where, according to him, he was accepted normally.

"Even though a classmate called me a fool," adds Kostja.

According to the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Dmytro Lubinets, around 400 Ukrainian deported children have already been placed with Russian families. All of them were handed over to these families for adoption, Lubinec said in an interview with DW. Only a few such cases are publicly known, the most famous of which is the case of a girl taken from an orphanage in Kherson. Last year, journalists learned that she was adopted by the deputy of the Russian State Duma, Sergei Mironov, together with his wife.

The Ukrainian non-governmental organization "Regional Center for Human Rights" has determined from open sources the whereabouts of 378 Ukrainian children deported to the Russian Federation and placed in Russian families. At the same time, human rights defenders did not find court decisions on adoption in the name of the adoptive parents.

"If there is no court decision, there was no adoption," says Katerina Rashevska, an expert at the organization, adding that Russians can hide these decisions.

Unlike a child in a foster family, an adopted child is equal to a natural child, the expert explains.

"The parents can change his name, surname, patronymic, place of birth and date of birth within six months. Then we will not find such a child. Especially if he is small and if a lot of time has passed," Rashevskaya said in an interview with DW.

"Resource" foster families in the Russian Federation

Human rights activists from the "Regional Center for Human Rights" have identified the names of 69 adoptive parents. According to the organization, almost all families are resourceful, that is, they are already raising several adopted children.

"By profession, most of them are teachers," Rashevskaya comments. "There are both military and former military personnel who participated in the Chechen wars. There are people working in the sphere of culture and religious figures. There are also many activists and representatives of charitable foundations among the adoptive parents." DW spoke with one of the Russian guardians - Volodymyr from the Moscow region (name changed). His family is raising a Ukrainian boy Maxim (name changed. - Ed.), who, together with other orphans, was taken out of the country from occupied Donetsk to Kursk two days before the start of the full-scale Russian invasion. Representatives of the guardianship authorities turned to Volodymyr's family as a source. According to the man, the family agreed to take in the boy after learning that he had no parents, and his own sister could not take care of his brother. At first, Maxim hoped to return to his usual life in a boarding school. When the boy realized that this was impossible, he decided to stay with a foster family, says Volodymyr. Maxim was granted Russian citizenship so that, according to the guardian, the child could receive free medical care. Back in May 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree simplifying the process of obtaining Russian citizenship for Ukrainian children so that Russians could adopt them into their families.

 

Volodymyr claims that his family opposes Russian aggression in Ukraine. He says that at first Maksim spoke negatively about Ukraine and Ukrainians and wanted to return to the "DNR" after he came of age. According to him, the guardian explained to Maksim that Russia attacked Ukraine, and not vice versa.

"We always emphasize the dignity of the Ukrainian nation and its right to independence. All our children know our position, and so does he," the man assures.

Responsibility for violation of children's rights

According to the Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, deported children face re-education in Russian families.

"They say: "You are Russian. You speak Russian. Forget everything that happened before and start a new life. You go to school, you get new Russian documents. You are raised as real Russians. And you should be grateful that we saved you," says Lubinets.

He believes that law enforcement agencies should qualify the actions of Russian adoptive parents. For his part, he sees a violation of the rights of Ukrainian children placed in Russian families, especially the right to freedom of movement and the use of their native language.

"The basic rights of Ukrainian children were violated by the Russian Federation. In particular, they were violated by Russian families who took them either under temporary guardianship or for adoption. For me, there is no legal difference - the rights of a Ukrainian child were violated by the Russian Federation and citizens of the Russian Federation," Lubinets is convinced.

At the same time, the Russian guardian Volodymyr says that he is not afraid of responsibility for taking the Ukrainian child under his care.

"If an international court finds me guilty, I am ready to bear responsibility, but my conscience is clear, because I did not have pro-war, aggressive motives. From the very beginning, what is happening there was painful. I wanted to help the child in his life situation," the man says.

Katerina Rashevskaya, an expert at the "Regional Center for Human Rights," says that the placement of Ukrainian children in Russian families is a crime, because the UN prohibits the adoption of children from one side of the conflict to another.

"The second part of the norms concerns upbringing - it must be carried out by a representative of the same cultural and ethnic group to which the child belongs," the expert explains.

However, she does not insist that the guardians are to blame.

"We are starting to count those responsible from the guardianship council. They are implementing the policy of Lviv-Belova and Putin - to divide these children as soon as possible," says Raševska.

She also considers the Russian governors responsible, who, according to her, developed a system of encouraging families to take Ukrainian children, children's ombudsmen in the occupied territories and, ultimately, the president of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin and the Russian ombudsman for children Maria Lvova-Belova, for whom the International Criminal Court has already issued arrest warrants in the case of deportation of Ukrainian children.

"And also - the United Russia party with a number of deputies," adds Rashevskaya. "Especially their deputy speaker of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, former Commissioner for Children's Rights Anna Kuznetsova, who initiated legislative changes to simplify the process of guardianship and adoption."

Return of deported children to Ukraine

Kostya from the Kherson region did not spend a month in his new family in the suburbs of Anapa. The boy was contacted by his sister, who had already turned 18, and offered to return to Ukraine. Kostya initially refused, because, according to him, he was already used to his new parents.

"Then I woke up and texted her: 'Go'. And she was already on her way. Then I changed my mind again. So I hesitated several times because we were scared. I thought I wanted to come to Ukraine – but here there is no food, nothing, and in Russia, they said, I will have everything. As for returning, Kostya consulted with his adoptive parents.

"They said: 'The decision is yours,' but they advised me to stay. They suggested that, on the contrary, the whole family should move to Russia," says the boy.

In the end, he decided to return to Ukraine, because he wanted to see his relatives who had moved from the Kherson region to Chernihiv.

"When I saw the Ukrainian flag and coat of arms at the border, I immediately felt that I had returned to my country," recalls Kostya.

In Kiev, the boy was placed in a hotel run by Save Ukraine, an NGO that helps repatriate deported Ukrainian children. Kostya spent the next few months with his family. However, neither his seriously ill father nor his sisters could care for the boy. He accepted this with understanding and returned to the Save Ukraine hotel.

Recently, a new foster family was found for Kostya in Poltava. He has already moved there and, according to the benefactor, has adapted. Despite the difficult journey and the inability to live with relatives, the boy told DW that he does not regret returning to Ukraine.

Strategy for the return of children from Russia

According to official Ukrainian data, out of 19,500 deported Ukrainian children, almost 390 have been returned so far. Not all of them were placed with Russian families. At least three children who were returned from their families are publicly known.

Civil servants and human rights defenders involved in the return process say that it is most difficult to return to families in the Russian Federation.

"It is even more difficult with complete orphans. When there are parents or blood relatives in Ukraine, they can go and get the children. But when they are not, it is impossible," Katerina Bobrovska, the lawyer of 18-year-old Bohdan Jermohin, who managed to return from the Russian family, commented to DW last year. Another boy, whose return Bobrovska worked on, ran away from his foster family in the Russian Federation, because he had no guardians in Ukraine who could take him.

 

Russian guardian Volodymyr, who adopted a boy named Maxim from Donetsk, condemns the deportation to the Russian Federation of Ukrainian children who have relatives in their homeland. At the same time, he calls the relocation of his adopted son Maxim to the territory controlled by Ukraine "a very difficult issue".

"What will happen to his psyche? He lived in a boarding school (in occupied Donetsk. - Ed.), did not see his family," the man thinks. "They were brainwashed there that Ukraine is the enemy..." .

The unhindered return of Ukrainian children from Russian families will be possible only after the end of the war, which can last for years, suggests Katerina Rashevskaya, an expert at the "Regional Center for Human Rights". In this case, in her opinion, removing a child from a Russian family and placing him in a Ukrainian orphanage in order to find a new family can be traumatic for this child. "And suddenly he loves this family so much that he absolutely does not want a new one?" - Rashevskaya thinks.

In her opinion, Ukraine should develop a system for the return of such children:

“For example, these Russian families will go either to the territory of Ukraine or to the territory of a third country. And they will be obliged to provide these children with a Ukrainian education, to raise them not as Russians, but as Ukrainians, but the children will stay with them”.

The head of the NGO Save Ukraine Mykola Kuleba believes that Ukraine should return all children from Russian families.

“Remove them from the Russian family, bring them to Ukraine and tell them the truth. Because the child was placed in this family by fraud,” says Kuleba, while agreeing that this issue is debatable.

“For us as a state, the fact remains that this is a Ukrainian child,” Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinet reminds us in turn. He believes that decisions about where such a child will live should be made by his relatives or, if there are none, by Ukrainian state bodies.

“If a person is 18 years old, it will be enough for us to hear: “Everything suits me, I consider myself a citizen of the Russian Federation and I will stay here. This is an adult's free choice. But I know that many adults will say that they want to return to Ukraine", adds Lubinec.