As many as 35,000 Ukrainian children are still missing and thought to be held in Russia or Russian-occupied territories, according to an American team of experts, with families saying they are being forced to take desperate and risky measures to try to rescue them.
As Russian forces began their invasion in February 2022, children were abducted from care homes, from the battlefield after the death of their parents, or under coercion directly from their families.
Russia has rejected demands for the children to be returned, with an official accusing Ukraine of “staging a show on the topic of lost children” during ceasefire talks in Turkey this month.
Speaking to the Guardian, one mother has described her own dramatic rescue of her two teenage sons who were held in a camp in Russia for almost six months.
After Russian forces occupied Natalia’s home city of Kherson on the eastern border of Ukraine, in September 2022, a neighbour advised her to send her sons to a children’s camp in Anapa, a seaside resort town in Russia.
“The 21-day trip was free and they were meant to return to Kherson at the end. The boys wanted to go too, but it was a big mistake on my part to allow it,” she says.
In late 2022, Ukrainian forces liberated Natalia’s city, but her children were in a camp on the other side of the frontline and Russia would not let them return home.
“The camp authorities refused to let the children leave without my physical presence,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Eventually, with the help of a Ukrainian organisation, Natalia obtained a passport and Ukrainian identification documents for her children. She then travelled alone across the border to the Russian town of Anapa on the northern coast of the Black Sea, passing through numerous border checkpoints where she had to explain to Russian soldiers why she was in the country.
She was travelling for six days, amid shelling, before finally being reunited with her children in February 2023. “You cannot even imagine my emotions, because my children are all I have,” she says.
So far just 1,366 children have been returned or escaped back to Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian organisation Bring Kids Back. A team of experts at Yale University has estimated that as many as 35,000 children may be held in Russia and its occupied territories.
It is feared that many have been taken by Russian forces and sent to military camps or foster care, or have even been adopted by Russian families.
Through extensive examination of Russian databases, official documents, family connections and even satellite images of Russian sites, official buildings and other sources, the Yale team has been able to establish the identities of thousands of children.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been investigating the abductions, says: “This is likely the largest child abduction in war since world war two – comparable to the Germanification of Polish children by the Nazis.”
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