When news of the Russian invasion spread across Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Natalia Lukina was waiting for a taxi. It was 6:00 a.m. and she was eager to get to work at the Kherson Children’s Home, a state-run foster home for children with special needs, where she worked as a doctor.
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When he arrived, the thunder of artillery fire from Russian troops advancing toward the city of Kherson, the region’s capital, echoed through the corridors. The doctor and other caregivers faced a problem: how to protect dozens of vulnerable children.
They were all babies and toddlers, and some had severe disabilities, such as cerebral palsy. Some had parents who retained limited custody, while others had been removed from troubled homes or abandoned.
“Who else would have stayed to take care of them?” Lukina said about her decision to stay with the little ones.
Olena Korniyenko, director of the home and the children’s legal guardian, had prepared emergency bags for the children and stocked the home with food, water and diapers.
But the building was not equipped to withstand gunfire or bombing, and the police had already fled the city.
Korniyenko looked online for a map of nearby bomb shelters and found one within walking distance.
Amid exchanges of gunfire, staff took the children and their mattresses to a basement, taking with them medications, electric pumps and feeding tubes.
A local pastor heard about their situation that day and urged the foster home staff to take the children to his church. So the staff relocated the children to the basement of the Holhofa church.
A nurse, Kateryna Sirodchuk, said they feared Russian forces would take the children.
And their fears were soon realized: on April 25, 2022, Russian officials found the children and took them under their authority, moving them 290 kilometers from home.
Evidence shows that the transfer was part of a broader and systematic campaign by President Vladimir V. Putin and his political allies to strip the war’s most vulnerable victims of their Ukrainian identity. The New York Times reviewed Russian social media posts; obtained photographs, videos, text messages and documents; and interviewed more than 110 caregivers, legal experts, and Russian and Ukrainian officials to track the movement of the children when they were taken into Russian custody.
What happened to them, legal experts say, may constitute a war crime.
Two weeks after the invasion, Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, sat across from Putin in a televised meeting to ask for help. She wanted to relocate Ukrainian daycare children caught in the crossfire of the war. He promised to eliminate any legal “red tape” so they could be placed with Russian families.
In statements before the invasion, Putin had made clear that he sought the cultural assimilation of Ukrainian towns and cities that he believed were historically Russian. And now, as officials shook hands, a plan was put into motion for the permanent removal and deportation of its youngest residents.
“Deep down, they believe the children are Russian,” said Serhii Plokhy, a historian of Ukraine at Harvard University in Massachusetts.
For weeks, Ukrainian officials and police had struggled to find a way to evacuate the children from the Holhofa church, which by then was in occupied territory.
In April, a Ukrainian commissioner asked via Telegram for help to rescue them.
Hours later, gunmen led by a Russian official calling himself Navigator showed up at the church and demanded that the children be returned to the Kherson Children’s Home. Cameras from a Crimea-based propaganda outlet filmed their arrival, and the resulting story accused Ukrainian authorities of kidnapping the children.
The caregivers had no choice but to take the children back to the foster home in Kherson, where the occupation forces had tighter control.
By spring 2022, the occupation of Kherson had become a model for the forced assimilation of a Ukrainian town and its residents: a new occupation government was appointed in Kherson and a Russian flag was raised in front of the host home.
Over the next few months, Russian officials documented their efforts to help children on Telegram. Navigator visited the foster home repeatedly. He would later be identified as Igor Kastyukevich, a member of the Russian Parliament from Putin’s political party, United Russia.
In May, Putin issued a decree that relaxed citizenship requirements: in Kherson and other occupied regions, Ukrainian caregivers could apply for Russian citizenship on behalf of Ukrainian orphans and foster children. The decree also sped up the process so that children could become Russian citizens in 90 days or less.
The following month, Korniyenko, the director of the foster home, was summoned to the Kherson Ministry of Health. A Russian-backed official asked her to remain as director, but under his supervision. Korniyenko refused.
Lukina also resigned. She wanted no role in what Russian-backed officials might do to the children.
In search of a new director, the occupation authorities turned to Tetiana Zavalska, a pediatrician at the foster home. She was sympathetic to the new occupation administration and urged the authorities to formally register the foster home. It was registered that same month.
In August, Russian state television channel RT ran a segment celebrating the occupation of Kherson and introducing the foster home, now seen as a legal entity.
Broadcasts like this one, which highlighted Russia’s efforts to absorb Ukrainian children from the occupied territories, became common in Russia. Lvova-Belova was filmed handing children who had been removed from facilities in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine to new caregivers. He announced that they had become Russian citizens.
Some experts in the region see these actions as a campaign by the Kremlin to justify the invasion and present Putin as a savior. “This is Putin’s version of doing God’s work,” said Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It is absolute theater mixed with this pseudo-historical view that Ukraine does not exist.”
While Putin illegally annexed Kherson and three other regions, Ukrainian forces began a military campaign to retake the city of Kherson.
Russian officials came up with a plan for the children in the foster home. In a private online chat for medical students, health officials in occupied Crimea recruited volunteers to help transport them.
Natalia Kibkalo, a nurse at the center, had just put nearly a dozen children, all sick with Covid, to bed when she heard the news: the children would be removed in the morning.
The next morning, October 21, she changed diapers and fed the children. But she couldn’t bear the thought of helping to get them out and she went home. “We understood that we couldn’t do anything, that we couldn’t stop this from happening,” Kibkalo said.
Around 8 a.m., ambulances and buses arrived at the house. The group included Navigator, as well as Crimea’s then-health minister — also a member of Putin’s party — his deputy, student volunteers and administrators from another foster home who would become the children’s new caregivers.
Zavalska gathered the children’s legal documents and medical records and prepared files for each.
They were then taken to waiting buses and ambulances.
The convoy left the foster home that same morning. At nightfall they reached their final destination.
The children were taken to Simferopol, the capital of Crimea, and divided into two children’s centres.
Russian officials have argued that it was an act of humanitarian intervention and legal under their constitution because they annexed Kherson. “It doesn’t matter who they are and who they were,” said Svetlana Scherbakova, head of children’s services in Crimea. “The children now have a peaceful sky above their heads.”
But human rights experts say Russian laws do not override international obligations.
While the temporary evacuation of children for their safety is permitted during conflict, strict protocols must be followed.
“What Russia considers a humanitarian mission is a blatant war crime,” said Stephen J. Rapp, former US special ambassador for global criminal justice.
One couple said they learned their children were in Crimea only when Times journalists visited them in Kherson six months later — even though documents showed Russian officials had their names and addresses.
Their children, Mykola, who had autism, and Anastasiya Volodin, who had cerebral palsy, were taken into state custody years ago after the couple was ruled unable to care for them. Ukrainian courts had yet to rule on his parental rights. “I will not allow anyone to adopt them,” said Roman Volodin, his father.
In the winter of 2022, the new caregivers, together with Zavalska, the appointed legal guardian, took steps to formally integrate the children into Russian society.
First, the caregivers requested Russian birth certificates for the children and translated their names into Russian.
Caregivers also arranged for the children to obtain Russian social security numbers, saying it was a requirement for the children to receive medical care.
Eventually the children received Russian citizenship, the final step necessary for them to be adopted and permanently placed with Russian families.
Legal experts said the new documents revealed Russian authorities’ intention to strip children of their Ukrainian identity, in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It may also constitute a war crime.
Just after the war anniversary, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and his Children’s Rights Commissioner, accusing them of “illegally” removing “at least hundreds of children” from children’s homes in Ukraine.
At a news conference last year, Putin’s office dismissed the arrest warrants as “petty.” Months later, Putin said there would be “no obstacles” to returning the children — as long as their parents traveled to claim them.
There is no consensus on how many children were forcibly relocated or deported to Russia. Ukraine says the total is about 19,500 children, but officials in kyiv struggled to verify the figure.
Ukrainian investigators are trying to track down and return the children and have opened criminal cases against Navigator and Zavalska, the director.
Late last year, photographs of the children began appearing on a Russian federal adoption site. Their profiles, 22 in all, listed them as being from Crimea. At least two have been placed with Russian families, Crimean children’s services report.
Seven of the children from the Kherson Children’s Home have returned to Ukraine with the help of Ukrainian authorities and Qatari mediators. Among them were Anastasiya and Mykola Volodin, whose mother traveled to Moscow in February to claim them.
Anastasiya, 6, later died in a Ukrainian hospital. A doctor attributed her death to an epileptic seizure. Ukrainian authorities have resumed Mykola’s care while a court determines whether her parents can be her legal guardians.
For now, the rest of Kherson’s children remain in Russian custody.
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