At a meeting with President Donald Trump and several European leaders at the White House, Volodymyr Zelensky raised the issue of Ukraine's «kidnapped children». World leaders assured that this issue would be addressed, and the founder of the organization «Save Ukraine», Mykola Kuleba, insists that world leaders «must focus on the children, not just the land».
NBC News reported the story of Vladyslav Rudenko from Kherson, who in October 2022 (when he was 16 years old) was taken from his apartment by armed masked men and taken to an unknown location. This marked the beginning of an eight-month nightmare as the teenager became part of Russia's systematic efforts to relocate and re-educate thousands of children from Ukraine, in some cases forcibly adopting them, and sending others to military camps.
The young man told journalists that he was taken to a camp in annexed Crimea, and then to a naval academy in the Kherson region, occupied by Putin's troops. «They tried to break me in every possible way», he said, adding that in the first camp he was treated «very badly» and starved because he «began to show his pro-Ukrainian stance».
According to him, in regular classes with other Ukrainian children, whose ages ranged from 6 to 18 years, they were told only about Russia, noting which Ukrainian territories had been captured.
Vlad Rudenko's mother, Tatyana, learned that he was being held in a camp in Lazurne in southeastern Ukraine. She contacted the organization «Save Ukraine», which has rescued more than 750 children, and after several months of planning, organized a trip to Russia for her and six other women.
According to Tatyana, there was no direct route across the front line, so she traveled through Poland, Belarus, and Russia's capital Moscow before she managed to reach the camp through Crimea. She said that upon arrival she was roughly searched by masked people, and the next day FSB officers came, put a mask on her head, and took her somewhere for interrogation, after which they «took away her documents and phone». She said she was interrogated for «six or seven hours», with an operator and journalist present, who, she claims, were waiting for her to say «how great Russia is, how it helps us, and how bad Ukraine is for us».
She managed to contact «Save Ukraine» via text message and the group told her: «Do whatever it takes, just get out of there». After an on-camera interview, she was released along with Vlad and allowed to go home.
According to Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health (HRL), a leading organization tracking kidnapped Ukrainian children, Ukrainian children are currently located in approximately 200 places in Russia and occupied territories.
Experts say that as Russia tries to take control of more Ukrainian territories, rescuing Ukrainian children becomes an even more urgent task. «It is even more necessary to return all the children before the door closes», says Raymond.
The International Criminal Court has accused Vladimir Putin and the Commissioner for Children's Rights Maria Lvova-Belova of deporting children from Ukraine to Russia, issuing an arrest warrant for them in March 2023.
Photo: Yan Dobronosov