Yana and Dani, 14 years old, are destiny companions. They represent a phenomenon that Russia calls a special operation to save the children of the region, Ukraine and Western countries call it forced deportation and Russification.
“If you want to physically eliminate an ethnic group, it is not necessary to kill all its representatives. You can forcibly change their identity and the entire ethnic group will disappear,” said Oleksandra Matvichuk, a human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate.
“Russia saw that now there is an opportunity to improve the demographic situation. /…/ To put even more pressure on the Ukrainian people, to destroy them even more mentally. Because in fact, taking away children can be worse for a nation, both spiritually and in terms of the future,” said volunteer researcher Jaanika Merilo.
“We now know that this is a systematic policy and involves multiple levels of government, from doctors to teachers, from local officials to governors and up to the very top, the Kremlin,” said Ukrainian child abduction researcher Tetiana Fedosiuk.
The first allegations of systematic deportation of children from Ukrainian territories date back to 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and, at the instigation of the Kremlin, the so-called breakaway people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk emerged in eastern Ukraine.
Former Estonian ambassador to Russia Margus Laidre believes that Russia’s goal from the beginning was not to abduct children. “However, the specific political-military situation that arose on the ground provided an opportunity as an additional measure through which to influence Ukraine in the desired direction from the Kremlin’s point of view, and obviously this opportunity was exploited,” he added Laidre. .
If the words “deportation” or “deportation” bring to mind forced cramming onto wagons, things are often more subtle. For example, in the case of Yana, Diana and Danili, who lived in Kherson, the occupiers proposed temporarily sending the children away from the combat zone to a children’s camp in Crimea, which many parents agreed to. In the meantime, however, the Ukrainians took back Kherson and the children remained on the Russian side.
“The school said you go to a camp for two weeks, the city is bombed, you should rest. And we went to the camp with a couple of our teachers. When Kherson was heavily bombed, the teachers left us. They went to their families and we were left there alone in the camp,” Diana said.
“The head of the guard said we will stay there for a year because the Russian army left Kherson and it is not safe to stay there with Ukrainian soldiers,” Danil said.
“We were there alone, completely alone in a strange city, in a strange country, surrounded by strangers and unfriendly people. /…/ I was confused as to why this happened to us,” Diana added.
Moscow talks about evacuation and humanitarian corridors, but they all lead only to Russia. For example, according to Ukrainian sources, essentially all residents of orphanages, which educators could not hide, were transferred from the occupied territories to Russia.
“First, they are placed in temporary places of detention such as children’s camps, repurposed hospitals in the occupied territories of Ukraine. And then the children are taken to Russia and placed in Russian children’s institutions,” Fedosiuk said.
According to Fedosiuk and Matvichuk, years of work have been done to resettle children in Russia because this requires enormous logistical organization. “You have to understand that it takes a lot of logistical organization to move such a large number of nervous people from the territory of one country to another and then accommodate them in different regions of Russia. Ten years have passed, it was planned,” Matvichuk said.
“From Russia’s point of view, it is certainly not about deportation or theft of children, but about helping these poor children – they are helped, then from Russia’s point of view they are taken away from the dangerous war zone in Russia, where it is offered them a future safe haven, so to speak. But the other side of this safe future is actually this indoctrination, this brainwashing, that these children actually become Russians from Ukrainians,” Laidre explained.
Many children can be difficult to find in Russia
Tetiana Fedosiuk, born in Odessa and moved to Estonia last March, works at the International Center for Defense Studies in Tallinn, helps translate Ukrainian refugees and recently wrote a study on the mass deportation of children. Human rights expert and lawyer Oleksandra Matvichuk heads the Kiev Human Rights Center and was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize for her work. Historian Margus Laidre was the last Estonian ambassador to Moscow. Before the war, Jaanika Merilo advised the Ukrainian government on economic issues, but now she contributes to charity. According to everyone, this is not an evacuation, but a bad faith activity, because Ukrainian children are brainwashed, used as a propaganda tool and, essentially, also as hostages. The best-known example is the children abducted in Mariupol in the eyes of the Ukrainians, who thanked Putin and the soldiers for the rescue.
A similar alienation from the roots also began with Diana, Danili and others trapped in a children’s camp on the Russian side.
“It resembled a closed prison environment,” Diana observed. “We had to speak in Russian. Everything related to Ukraine was forbidden. Anyone who broke this rule was punished,” her sister said.
According to Fedosiuk, children brought from Ukraine to Russia are told that their families have abandoned them and don’t want them, that Ukraine doesn’t want them and that they will never see their families again and that they will be sent to live with Russian families . . According to him, children are forbidden to speak Ukrainian and are told that they are Russian, and children must sing the Russian national anthem. According to him, some children were even punished physically if they refused to do so.
“It has been made clear to us that we are not going anywhere from here, that our parents have abandoned us and will no longer come looking for us,” Danil said.
“What is really terrifying in my opinion, if we take Estonia’s recent history again, there are examples of middle-aged people who were raised and raised as Russians, but who later found out that their identity had been stolen, who were actually Estonian children who, for one reason or another, were orphaned in Siberia and who only then, even as old men, discover that they are a completely different person. In my opinion, realizing this is so psychologically terrible which is difficult to overcome”, commented Laidre.
In addition, several changes to the law have been made recently in Russia that simplify and accelerate the granting of Russian citizenship and the adoption of children into new families. No one has an exact picture of the number of children abducted either by order or by ban, but Russia itself has claimed that 700,000 children have sided with it for the war, Ukrainian sources speak of at least 100,000-200,000 children separated from their loved ones and I’m somewhere in Russia.
It is for this reason that on March 17 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova, who is leading this program of forced Russification.
According to Ukrainian data, since the beginning of the war almost 20,000 children taken from their territories have been adopted into new foster families, including a young man from Mariupol who lives in the Lvova-Belova house. If the location of this boy is known and he himself claims that he is happy with life in Moscow, it is difficult to find many in the vastness of Russia, especially if the child has new documents, which may have a Russified form of his name.
Estonians also help search for Ukrainian children
In addition to the Human Rights Commissioner of Ukraine, several organizations are involved in the search for children, including the NGO Herojam Slava, of which Jaanika Merilo is one of the founders. Like many others, the NGO started out sending drones to the front lines and other humanitarian aid, but has changed its profile.
“And when we read the stories of these deported children and how there are hundreds of thousands of deportees whose names we don’t know, whose whereabouts we don’t know, it seemed to us that these are the skills we can offer. /. ../ And we started looking for where the children were, the names of those who had been taken, where, from where… And we had excellent contacts with the commissioner for human rights, who, on the one hand, told us provides the list of who to look for and on the other hand to whom we deliver the lists of who we find”, said Merilo.
For security reasons, Merilo does not reveal exactly how the children are found, but admits that social media and the Internet play an important role.
“Of course, it is difficult to find a three-year-old child who has been sent to a very distant place, especially if he changes with age, if his face changes, his passport is issued, his name is changed, which happens often. But when they are older, they still have some kind of footprint on social media or their friends have some kind of footprint or there are some news channels that say we have Ukrainian children here or for example the Russian Orthodox Church says they have gone to go visit the kids somewhere or something like that. We use as much information as is open and a little as much as is closed,” Merilo explained.
Some children have returned to their families
The found children are not stolen or smuggled, but Russia’s duplicity comes in handy here. Since Russia claims that there is no war going on in Ukraine and that the children were evacuated only as part of a special operation, parents or other relatives have repeatedly managed to take them from Ukraine to Russia.
“They can’t go directly to Russia, they go through Europe, then to Belarus and then to Russia. It’s a journey of thousands of kilometers for already traumatized parents, grandparents or other relatives. And success is not guaranteed, because Russia can just refuse and say they won’t extradite the child,” Fedosiuk said.
While Russian authorities throw in the towel and in some cases have even requested DNA testing, Ukraine has reported the return of around 360 children, of which Merilo and his collaborators claim to be related to around 15.
Danil and Diana, along with his sister and brother, were also found after months of searching and reunited with their parents.
According to Laidre, the deportation of children must not be forgotten. “We can definitely do one thing, which seems simple, but maybe in reality it is not so simple. That is, we must tell this story, we must not let this story be forgotten. And we must give these Ukrainian children a platform, a opportunity to speak and bring their story, so to speak, into international life, to show what tragedies have befallen them, what their experiences are, and for Westerners, in their everyday comfort, to also realize that such things happen still in the 21st century world and they are unacceptable,” Laidre said.
2023-12-20 18:28:00
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