Extremely difficult to return: Russia makes it impossible to search for abducted Ukrainian children - Guardian
Kyiv • UNN
According to The Guardian, Russia continues to massively abduct Ukrainian children, holding about 35,000 missing. Families are forced to take risks to retrieve children, who are often moved to military camps or orphanages.
Russia's mass criminal abduction of Ukrainian children in combat zones and adjacent regions continues. The occupied territories and the occupation regime separate families. Desperate parents travel to Russia in search of their children, many of whom have been transferred to military camps or orphanages. The Guardian writes about this, reports UNN.
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According to an American expert group, about 35,000 Ukrainian children are still considered missing and are believed to be held in Russia or Russian-occupied territories. Families say they are forced to resort to desperate and risky measures to try to rescue them.
When Russian troops launched the invasion in February 2022, children were abducted from orphanages, from the battlefield after their parents died, or directly from families under duress.
Russia rejected demands for the return of the children, and the Russian government accused Ukraine of "staging a show about lost children" during ceasefire talks in Turkey this month.
In an interview with the publication, one Ukrainian woman recounted her own dramatic experience of rescuing two teenage sons who had been held for almost six months in a camp in Russia.
After Russian troops occupied Natalia's hometown of Kherson on Ukraine's eastern border in September 2022, a neighbor advised her to send her sons to a children's camp in Anapa, a seaside resort town in Russia.
The 21-day trip was free, and they were supposed to return to Kherson at the end. The boys also wanted to go, but it was a big mistake on my part to let them.
At the end of 2022, Ukrainian troops liberated Natalia's city, but her children were in a camp on the other side of the front line, and Russia did not allow them to return home.
The camp administration refused to release the children without my physical presence. I didn't know what to do,
Eventually, with the help of a Ukrainian organization, Natalia obtained a passport and Ukrainian identification documents for her children. She then crossed the border herself to the Russian city of Anapa on the northern Black Sea coast, passing through numerous border checkpoints where she had to explain to Russian soldiers why she was in the country.
She traveled for six days under shelling before finally reuniting with her children in February 2023. "You can't even imagine my emotions, because my children are all I have," she says.
According to the Ukrainian organization "Bring Kids Back", only 1,366 children have currently been returned or fled back to Ukraine. A team of Yale University experts estimated that up to 35,000 children may be held in Russia and its occupied territories.
There are fears that many of them have been taken by Russian forces and sent to military camps or foster families, or even adopted by Russian families.
Through careful examination of Russian databases, official documents, family ties, and even satellite imagery of Russian facilities, official buildings, and other sources, the Yale University team was able to identify thousands of children.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University's Humanitarian Research Lab, which investigates the abductions, says: "This is probably the largest child abduction during wartime since World War II - comparable to the Germanization of Polish children by the Nazis."