“I was afraid to be there forever”: Returning children deported by Russia to Kyiv

They disappeared silently in the chaos of war. One autumn Friday, the day before the school holidays, hundreds of children from the Kherson region did not return home. School principals encouraged parents to send their children to a two-week summer camp in Crimea. And at the end of the holidays, no one came back. The Kherson children were trapped in what appears to be a massive Russian operation to deport and “Russify” Ukrainian children.

Seventeen children abducted from their families were returned to Kyiv on Wednesday, March 22 by the humanitarian organization Save Ukraine. Seventeen: This survival rate is shocking, while Ukraine has already identified 16,226 deported children and the number could be much higher. The seventeen children are the first to return from Russia or the occupied territories of Ukraine since the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issued an arrest warrant on March 17. “illegal deportation” Ukrainian children against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova.

Fifteen of these children are from the Kherson region and were deported in an identical scenario. These are not extremely violent cases, as they are beginning to be documented by Ukrainian or international investigators of children abducted after the murder or arrest of a parent, or passing through “filtering camps” on deportation routes. Instead, they fell victim to an insidious method that consisted of sending them through the school system to summer camp and not returning to their families.

“They told us our parents didn’t want us anymore”

This is how hundreds of children were transferred from Kherson to Crimea on October 7, 2022 and did not return two weeks later. The principals of the schools informed the parents that, by order of the military administration, due to hostilities, the stay in the summer camp was extended to protect the children. The motive was false because, apart from the fact that it is against international law to separate children from their families, the Ukrainian army’s takeover of Kherson did not happen the following month, on November 11, after Russia’s military withdrawal. Good order and without ruining the city.