Olga Lopatkina paced around her basement in circles like a trapped animal. For more than a week, the Ukrainian mother had heard nothing from her six adopted children stranded in Mariupol, and she was going out of her mind with worry. Know more:
Olga Lopatkina paced around her basement in circles like a trapped animal. For more than a week, the Ukrainian mother had heard nothing from her six adopted children stranded in Mariupol, and she was going out of her mind with worry.
Russia’s open effort to adopt Ukrainian children and bring them up as Russian is already well underway, in one of the most explosive issues of the war, an Associated Press investigation shows. Russia claims that these children don’t have parents or guardians to look after them, or that they can’t be reached. But the AP found that officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren’t wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship.
Even where parents are dead, Rapp said, their children must be sheltered, fostered or adopted in Ukraine rather than deported to Russia. Russia portrays its adoption of Ukrainian children as an act of generosity that gives new homes and medical resources to helpless minors. Russian state media shows local officials hugging and kissing them and handing them Russian passports.
“Today he received a passport of a citizen of the Russian Federation and does not let go of it!” she posted on Telegram on Sept. 21, along with a photo. “[He] was waiting for this day in our family more than anyone else.” Suddenly, Timofey had become the father to all his siblings. Three had chronic illnesses or disabilities, and the youngest was just 7.
“When you walk and see brains of people on the road, right on the pavement, nothing matters,” he recalled. Instead, the children ended up in a hospital in the Donetsk People’s Republic, or DPR, a separatist Russian-controlled area in Ukraine. Timofey was only months away from turning 18—the age when he would be drafted into the DPR army against his homeland.
In 2014, after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, more than 80 children from Luhansk were stopped at checkpoints and abducted. Ukraine sued, and the European Court of Human Rights found the children were taken into Russia “without medical support or the necessary paperwork.” The children were returned to Ukraine before a final decision.
Kira, a 12-year-old girl who saw her father shot and killed, was evacuated from Mariupol to Donetsk with shrapnel wounds on her ear, leg, neck and arm. Kira was reunited with her grandparents only after the office of the Ukraine deputy prime minister got involved. Other officials in occupied territories loyal to Moscow have a more benign view of what Russia is doing. Olga Volkova, who heads an institution for children in Donetsk, had 225 kids evacuated to an area near the Russian seaside city of Taganrog, and 10 were taken in by Russian families in April. After DPR and Russian officials make a list of suitable candidates, her boarding school secures citizenship for them and sends them to new families in Russia.
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