Putin takes thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia for adoption

At the same time that Vladimir Putin’s troops besieged Mariupol at the beginning of the Ukrainian War, the city’s children fled from bombed communal homes and boarding schools. Separated from their families, they followed neighbors or strangers westward in search of the relative safety of the invaded central region.

Instead, at checkpoints around the city, pro-Russian forces intercepted them, say children, witnesses and family members. The authorities then put them on buses heading to Russian-held territories.

“I didn’t want to go,” says Ania, 14, who escaped from a home for tuberculosis patients in Mariupol and now lives with a foster family near Moscow. “But nobody asked me.”

In her haste to flee, she left behind a sketchbook with her mother’s phone number, and says she can only remember the first three digits of it.

Since the beginning of the invasion that started the war in late February, the Russian government has announced with patriotic exaggeration the transfer of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia for adoption and citizenship. On state television, authorities offer teddy bears to newly arrived minors, who are portrayed as abandoned children being saved from war.

In fact, this mass transfer of children is a potential war crime, whether or not they are orphans. In addition, although many of them came from orphanages and shelters, minors whose relatives or guardians want them back were also taken, according to interviews with children and families on both sides of the border.

As Russian troops advanced through Ukraine, children like Ania, who were fleeing newly invaded territories, were stopped. Some were taken after their parents were killed or arrested by Russian troops, according to the Ukrainian government.

This systematic resettlement is part of a broader strategy by Russian President Vladimir Putin to treat Ukraine as part of Russia and design his invasion, seen as illegal by the West, as a noble cause. His government has used children – including the sick, poor and orphans – as part of a propaganda campaign that presents the nation as a charitable savior.

Through interviews with parents, staff, doctors and children in Ukraine and Russia, the report identified several of the minors who were taken. Some returned home. Others, like Ania, remain in Russia.

Ania was interviewed several times via instant messages and voice memos, and a number of key details she provided were confirmed by her friends, photographs, and a diary she kept identifying other people she had been with. She asked the report not to contact her adoptive parents, who had told her not to talk to strangers.

Ania says that she lived apart from her mother before the war, and that she had only sporadic contact with her. Without the phone number, the girl cannot find her again.

At first, the reporters couldn’t either.

The New York Times cannot identify Ania’s full name. A shy young woman with a passion for drawing, she says her Russian adoptive family treats her well, but that she longs to return to Ukraine. Soon, however, she will become a Russian citizen. “I don’t want to,” she says. “My friends and relatives are not here.”

Ania and other children described a painful process of coercion, deception and use of force when they were sent to Russia from Ukraine. Their accounts add to a growing body of evidence gathered by governments and news outlets about a removal and adoption policy that targets vulnerable children in distress.

Moving people out of occupied territory can be considered a war crime and, according to experts, is an especially thorny practice when it involves children, who may not be able to have a say.

Ukraine accuses Russia of committing genocide. The forcible transfer of children, when intended to destroy a national group, is an act of genocide under the definitions of international law.

The Russian government makes it clear that its aim is to replace any childhood attachment to home with a love of Russia.

The Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belov, was responsible for organizing the transfers and adopted a teenager from Mariupol herself.

Targeted by Western sanctions, she said the boy was homesick at first, and even took part in a rally in support of Ukraine. “He longed for the house where he grew up, his friends and his dear Mariupol,” she wrote on Telegram. But the children soon begin to appreciate their new home, she continued.

The exact number of resettled children is not known. Russia did not respond to the report’s questions on the matter. Ukraine, for its part, said that there is no precise number, but that it is in the thousands.

In April, the Russians announced the arrival of 2,000 children in the country. According to them, most came from community homes and orphanages in long-occupied territories, but 100 came from newly invaded areas. In the following months, authorities continued to announce hundreds of new arrivals.

While the transfer of children from recently occupied land has been sporadic so far, the Russian government has just announced more efficient resettlement plans, raising the chance that there will be many more transfers in the future.

Russia’s Tactics of War explores some of the most complex and intimate family dynamics. Russian families talk about adoption as a matter of patriotism, but they also express a sincere desire to provide a better life for these children. While many Ukrainian parents seek to get their children back, others don’t even try, either for financial reasons or because their relationship with them had been broken before the war.

In Salekhard, Siberia, along the Arctic Circle, Olga Druzhinina says she adopted four children, ages 6 to 17, from Donetsk, capital of the Ukrainian region of the same name occupied by Russians since 2014. of the four that Vladimir Putin recently annexed through referendums deemed illegal by the West.

“Our family is like a little Russia,” says Drujinina. “The country conquered four territories and the family adopted four children.”

She says she is expecting a fifth child, and that she considers them totally Russian. “We are not taking what is not ours,” she says.

‘They took all the children’

Ania was living and recovering from tuberculosis in a tree-lined community shelter, which still had a red balance. When explosions destroyed the building’s windows and doors, the children fled to the basement, where Ania read fairy tales to the younger ones and spent time drawing.

Many parents rescued their children from the building. Others didn’t, either because they couldn’t make it through the war zone or because, like Ania’s mother, they were inaccessible.

Children at the shelter say a volunteer put about 20 of them, including Ania, in an ambulance bound for the city of Zaporijia. But the vehicle was rerouted at a Russian checkpoint, and they ended up with dozens more young people in a hospital in Donetsk — which has been the center of Russia’s child transfer policy since the beginning of the war.

For Ania and others brought in from newly occupied territories, Donetsk served as a sort of way station on the way to Moscow. That was also the case for Ivan Matkovski, 16, who says he ended up in a local hospital after fleeing a government boarding school in Mariupol and being redirected to a Russian checkpoint.

He says that among the other children in the hospital was an eight-year-old boy named Nazar who had hidden with his mother in a Mariupol theater hit by air strikes — one of the atrocities that defined the war. He survived, but did not find his mother again.

Local officials in the Mariupol region told similar stories of children who survived the Russian attack and ended up in nearby hospitals. Vasil Mitko, a civil servant from the city of Nikolske who helped at the scene, says that a child arrived in a stroller along with a handwritten note that read: “This is Micha. Please help him!”

One by one, however, the children disappeared, Mitko continues. “They just took all the kids who were left without parents,” she said. “We still don’t know where they are.”

‘Our little fellow citizens’

The Russian government carefully organizes a route for the transfer of children from the Donetsk region to Moscow. In May, Putin instituted a streamlined process to nationalize Ukrainian minors quickly. The first boys and girls to arrive in the country, in April, became Russian citizens in July, for example.

“I did not recognize those children we traveled with on the train in April to their new life,” Ksenia Michonova, children’s rights commissioner for the Moscow region, said in a statement. “Now they are our little fellow citizens!”

Some children have actually been orphaned or abandoned in Ukraine and prefer to live in Russia. The report spoke to a teenager from Mariupol who said he has no family in his country, and that his adoptive family loves him as if he were one of them.

Others, like Ania, want to go back.

She said she participates in a weekly class called Conversations About Important Things. The half-hour lesson, recently introduced by Putin, teaches children to be proud of Russia.

Sometimes, she says, she cries wondering if something horrible has happened to her family.

After more than a month of investigation, reporters found Ania’s mother Oksana in Ukraine. Without a job or internet access, and living on a small disability pension, she said she had no idea how to locate her daughter in the midst of the war.

“I’m looking everywhere, but I can’t find it,” he says. “She’s looking for me.”

The mother said she did not know that Ania had been taken to Russia.

Reporters explained how mother and daughter could communicate. The prospect of Ania returning home, however, is unclear. Ukraine’s government does not explain how it managed to retrieve dozens of children from Russia.

“Is this really her phone number?” Ania asked.