IZIUM, Ukraine (AP) — The Russian occupation radio and newspaper ads promoted the camps as a summer break from the war for Ukrainian children under their…
One bus convoy left Izium at the end of August, with the promise that the children would return home in time for the school year. Instead, Ukrainian forces swept though in early September, driving the Russians into a disorganized retreat and liberating territory that had been in enemy hands for months.Sign up to receive daily headline news from Ottawa Citizen, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
They are afraid they are seen as collaborators, willing participants in handing their children over to the enemy. “I’m not going back,” said the husband, Valeriy Polyvoda, reached by phone in Russia. Polyvoda blamed the children’s plight on local authorities in Russia. He refused to say how many children were with him.
She signed a document promising to stay in Russia, picked up the girl and managed to get both of them out the same way she came, through the occupied territories, the war zone and back to Ukraine.“We will burn your country to ash,” the woman said the Russians told her. But she managed to get herself and her teenage daughter back to Izium. Her daughter told her 300 children from territories recently reclaimed by Ukraine remained behind.
The families who gathered Wednesday wrote out a list of their names and contact information. But phone service has been down for six months in Izium and communications are hit-or-miss. Most families speak periodically to their children using some of the satellite internet hotspots that the Ukrainian government has set up, but it’s difficult for the younger ones, said the father of the 9-year-old.
The southern Kherson region, near the annexed Crimean Peninsula, has cases as well, according to Mykhailo Podoliak, a presidential adviser. He did not know how many but said the government is trying to resolve the situation.
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