Stories of Ukrainian mothers returning their deported children from the Russian Federation and Crimea

Russia deported more than 19,000 children from Ukraine, allegedly rescuing them from the war zone. Some of the children were tricked into taking them to the Russian Federation and the temporarily occupied Crimea, supposedly “on vacation.”

Some mothers, together with volunteers of the Save Ukraine Foundation, are trying to return their children to Ukraine on their own.

At the beginning of April, a group of Ukrainian women traveled through Belarus to Russia to take their sons and daughters. The stories of some of these families are told by The New York Times.

Having overcome a path of almost 5 thousand kilometers in one direction only, it was possible to return home 15 children. The occupiers let them go because their parents came to pick them up in person.

Artem

15-year-old Artem was kidnapped by Russians from school in the Kharkiv region in the fall of 2022.

He came to his school in Kupyansk on September 7 to get the documents he needed to enter college. At this time, the Ukrainian military launched a counteroffensive. The Russians did not let anyone out of the city, so the teenager stayed there.

The next day, the Russian military drove their trucks and loaded Artem and other students into them. According to the boy, he thought about escaping through the back wall of the school, but it was not possible – everyone’s presence was checked.

A total of 13 children aged 7 to 17 were taken by the occupiers to a boarding school in the city of Perevalsk in Russia.

At that time, Artem’s mother, Nataliya Zhornyk, tried to get to the city, but due to heavy shelling, the military turned her back. Active hostilities did not subside for more than 3 weeks. Because of this, the woman had to file a police report that her son was missing.

Natalia did not know where her son was and what happened to him for several weeks. But one day the phone rang. It was Artyom.

“Mom, come get me“, – he said.

The boy knew his mother’s number by heart, and at the first opportunity he called the school director from his phone. The woman promised to pick him up when the fighting subsided.

Soon, the neighbor of the Zhornyk family managed to take her son, a classmate, Artem. This is how Nataliya found out about the Save Ukraine charitable organization, which has been helping mothers to return their children home from occupation and active war zones since 2014. The woman also decided to turn to volunteers for help.

The road to the son was difficult, in particular due to hostilities and the impossibility of crossing the border with the aggressor country. We had to go through Poland, Belarus and Russia, and from there – more than a thousand kilometers to Crimea.

“There are no words for all the emotions. I was full of emotions and nervous“, says Natalia Zhornyk, describing the meeting with Artyom.

Of the 13 children “evacuated” by the Russians from the Kupyan boarding school in September, only two returned to Ukraine, including Artem. Another 4 children went somewhere further to Russia.

Currently, there are 5 children left in Perevalsk, including two girls in first grade. They were in class when Mrs. Zhornyk took her son.

Maxim

Yulia Radzevilova divorced her son when she agreed to send 12-year-old Maksym to a camp in the temporarily occupied Crimea, supposedly for “rest”. However, Maxim was not returned after two weeks.

“I felt completely confused, I was biting myself. No one supported me. Family, parents, friends began to blame me“, she says.

Her son spent 5 months in the camp, and now the mother managed to bring him home.

After returning home, the boy told about the punishment, bullying from other children, as well as the forced performance of the Russian national anthem.

Maxim and other children were put under moral pressure – they were told that their parents would not take them from there and that later they would be sent to foster families or given up for adoption.

“He no longer had any hope that I would come“, Yuliya Radzevilova said about her son.

Sasha

Among the deported children was 16-year-old Sashko with autism. He lived in a boarding school for disabled children in Oleshki, Kherson Region. Due to illness, Olga Mazur’s son cannot speak.

The last time the woman saw her son was in the summer, when Kherson was occupied and the boarding school was run by a Russian director. When the bridge across the Dnieper was destroyed, it was impossible to reach my son.

In November, a woman saw a list of children taken to Crimea on the Internet. It turned out that Sashko was among them. According to Olga, she felt relief and excitement at the same time.

Olga notes that after her son’s return, her son’s psychological state worsened: he had never been so fearful before. Now he is “afraid of everything”.

The mother is also concerned about the fate of other children with disabilities from the care home in Oleshki, because some of them were confined to wheelchairs or beds.

Currently, their fate remains unknown.

We will remind that after the issuance of a warrant in The Hague for the arrest of the children’s ombudsman of Russia Maria Lvova-Belova, she stated that the relatives of Ukrainian children can freely come and pick them up. And then she added that there are “only 59 people”.

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