Thousands of children from Ukraine have been kidnapped by Russians. An 11-year-old appeared at the Hague Tribunal to testify against Russian President Putin. DW visited him.

One night, Ilias says, he came out of the basement with his mother. They wanted to ask a neighbor for water and some food. Almost everything around was in ruins and gunshots could be heard. “We didn’t get to the neighbor’s house,” says Ilias. A missile landed nearby. His mother was injured and died the next day.

Ilya is eleven years old and comes from Mariupol, the Ukrainian city symbol of the terror spread by Russia on February 24, 2022, when the war began. During the three-month siege of Mariupol, the Russian army almost completely destroyed the city and killed tens of thousands of civilians. One of them was Ilya’s mother, Natalya Matviyenko.

Thousands of children have been kidnapped from Ukraine

Ilias was seriously injured in his right leg when the rocket fell. Russian soldiers discovered him shortly after the attack and took him to a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, which has been under Russian occupation since 2014. The Russians wanted to send him to a Russian family but his grandmother, who lives in Uchhorod in the west Ukraine since 2017, she managed to get him from Donetsk and brought him to live with her.

Shortly thereafter, Ilias testified before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. His testimony contributed to the arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights representative Maria Luova-Belova.

Ilya is one of tens of thousands of children in Ukraine who have been abducted by Russian soldiers or officials in occupied Ukrainian territories since February 2022. According to Ukrainian authorities, the number of abducted minors is around 19,000. Putin’s spokeswoman Maria Luova-Belova boasted in the summer of 2023 that Russian authorities had already “rescued” 700,000 children from Ukraine. So far Ukraine has managed to repatriate around 400 abducted children.

Grandma’s Odyssey

There were many children from Ukraine in the hospital and there were also journalists recording the incidents, says Ilias. By chance, Ilia’s grandmother saw him in a video on social media. His grandmother, Olena Matviyenko, is allowed to release only a few details to the public. The return of Ilya and another girl was arranged with the help of the Ukrainian government and a Russian businessman.

Ilya and his grandmother returned to Ukraine via Turkey in late April 2022. In Ukraine, Ilya was initially transferred to a hospital in Kyiv for rehabilitation. There, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked him if he would be willing to tell his story to investigators at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Ilias agreed. Since then, he has not only testified there, but also before UN representatives, and has spoken to many Western politicians, including the US and Germany. “I realized I had to do this,” says Ilias. “So that there is no indifference and so that they know that they are not fairy tales, but that they really happened.”

Ilya says he doesn’t think the arrest warrant against Putin will accomplish anything. “He’s stupid but at least he knows he can’t travel everywhere anymore.” Ilias himself wants to be a doctor when he grows up. “I don’t know if I can do it, but it’s my dream. But I may die tomorrow. This is war.”

Edited by: Maria Rigoutsou