This week, a group of 17 children returned to Ukraine with the help of an NGO from “deportation” from Russia or from the occupied Ukrainian territories, News.ro reports with reference to a report by the France-Presse agency.

In Kyiv, getting off the bus, a ten-year-old boy from a group of 17 children jumps into his father’s arms.

Denys Zaporichenko has not seen his son or his two daughters, who also travel on the bus, for six and a half months.

They all lived together in Kherson, in the occupied south of Ukraine, when they were separated, he says, on October 7, a month before the return of the city by Ukrainian troops.

Terrible battles were announced in Kherson as part of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, and Zaporozhchenko says he agreed to send his children away from the war, to “recreation camps” further south, in the annexed Crimea.

Russian officials at the school where his children attended “promised to send them to this camp for a week or two,” he says. “But by the time we realized we shouldn’t have done it, it was too late.”

He says that during these long months of separation, he was able to talk to his three children on the phone.

Ukraine considers these children, like at least 16,000 others, to be “kidnapped” by Russians.

Moscow denies this and boasts that it “saved” them from the war and created procedures to reunite them with their families.

Last week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, charging him with the “war crime of illegal deportation” of minors.

According to official data from the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine on Thursday, since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, 16,226 children have been deported.

Since that date, 465 children have died, 940 have been injured, and 395 are considered missing as a result of the war.

“Intimidation and blackmail”

Myroslava Khartsenko, a lawyer for the NGO Save Ukraine, which organized the repatriation of the 17 children, says the Russian authorities used “intimidation, manipulation and blackmail” to remove the children.

“They tell (parents) that they have an hour to think and that if the Ukrainians come, they will bring American mercenaries who will ‘beat and rape you, and this is your only chance to save your children.’

The non-governmental organization responds to the request of some desperate parents who were unable to heal their children due to the refusal of the Russian administration.

Without the help of government or international organizations and in the absence of a diplomatic agreement between Kyiv and Moscow, the NGO is forced to obey the administrative procedures implemented by the Russians for each repatriation.

The association managed to organize a group return to Ukraine for the first time.

She rented a bus, took several mothers on board and made a long circuitous route – through Poland, Belarus, Russia, and then Crimea, due to lack of permission to cross the front line, in the south of Ukraine.

Political re-education

Several children interviewed by AFP on Wednesday said they were not abused, but spoke of a form of political education designed to convert them to the Kremlin’s speech.

“If you didn’t sing the national anthem (of the Russian Federation), they forced you to write explanatory notes. And on New Year’s Day, we (Russian President Volodymyr) were shown Putin’s speech,” says Taisia ​​Volynska, a native of Kherson.

Yana Zaporozhchenko, Denis’s 11-year-old daughter, says there were “a lot of inspections” by Russian officials at the camp.

“We were asked to sing and dance when there were inspections,” the girl says.

43-year-old Inesa Vertosh, who was waiting for her son “day by day”, says that she found him “more serious”.

“He looks at me and says, ‘Mom, I don’t want to tell you, you’re not going to sleep at night,'” she says.

Myroslava Khartsenko from Save Ukraine assures that psychologists will deal with each of these children separately.

She urges her parents not to return to live in “dangerous areas”.

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