More than 30 children have been reunited with their families in Ukraine this week after a lengthy operation to bring them back from Russia, where they had been taken from occupied territories during the war, a humanitarian group said.
Kiev estimates that nearly 19,500 children have been brought to Russia since Moscow’s invasion last February, in what it condemns as illegal deportations.
Moscow, which controls parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, has denied kidnapping children, saying they were taken away for their own safety.
On Friday, the Save Ukraine charity said the children and their relatives had crossed the border into the Kyiv-controlled area.
According to released footage, the children, carrying suitcases and bags, crossed the border on foot and later boarded a bus to continue their journey.
“Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing completion. It was special because of the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity,” says Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine.
Kuleba praised the “heroic mothers” who had traveled to collect their children in what he called the charity’s “toughest” rescue missions to date.
The group helped the Ukrainian relatives of children brought to Russia with the logistics, transportation and planning needed to begin the long journey to collect and return their children.
A grandmother who was supposed to be reunited with two of her grandchildren died suddenly during the trip from “stress” and the children had to stay in Russia, Kuleba, Ukraine’s former children’s rights commissioner, told a media briefing in Kiev.
He wrote on Facebook that the Ukrainian family members had been subjected to a “13-hour interrogation” by Russia’s FSB security service.
Kuleba said all the children brought back to Ukraine by Save Ukraine said no one in Russia was trying to find their parents in Ukraine.
“There were kids who changed locations five times in five months. Some kids say they lived with rats and cockroaches,” he said. The children were transferred to what Russians called summer camps from occupied parts of Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Kherson regions, Kuleba said.
There was no immediate comment from Moscow.
Three children – two boys and a girl – attended the press briefing in Kiev. Save Ukraine said they were returned to Ukraine last month on an earlier rescue mission that saw a total of 18 children returned.
The three children said they were separated from their parents, who had been pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for two weeks from the occupied parts of Kherson and Kharkiv.
The children at the briefing said they were forced to stay in the summer camps for four to six months and were moved from one place to another during their stay.
“We were treated like animals. We were locked in a separate building,” says Vitaly, a child from the Kherson region whose age was not clear. He added that they had been told their parents no longer wanted them.
Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from Kiev, said there are believed to be many thousands of Ukrainian children still in Russia.
“Some of them, accompanied by their parents, have made active decisions to stay in Russia. But it is alleged that many more were illegally deported. According to the evidence of some who have returned, they were sometimes held against their will and subjected to degrading treatment, propaganda and indoctrination.”
Last month, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Children’s Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
Moscow has made no secret of a program that brought thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied territories to Russia, but presented the relocations as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and abandoned children in the conflict zone.
Russia has rejected the ICC’s allegations, says it does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction and is calling for the order against Putin and Lvova-Belova to be null and void.
Lvova-Belova told a press conference earlier this week that her committee acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in an area where military action was taking place and had not displaced anyone against their will or that of their parents or legal guardians. permission was always sought unless they were missing.
Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer for the Ukrainian NGO Regional Center for Human Rights, told the briefing that they were collecting evidence to build a case that Russian officials deliberately prevented the Ukrainian children from returning to their country.
“In every story there is a whole series of international violations and they cannot go unpunished,” she said.
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