For weeks after Russian troops forcibly removed Natalya Zhornyk’s teenage son from his school last fall, she had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. She then came a phone call.
“Mom come for me”said his son, 15-year-old Artem Hutorov.
She made him a promise: “When the fighting calms down, I will go.”
Artem and several classmates had been loaded onto trucks by Russian troops and taken to a school further into Russian-occupied Ukraine. While Zhornyk was relieved to know where he was being held, getting to him would not be easy. Now they were on different sides of the front line of a full-blown war, and the border crossings from Ukraine into Russian-occupied territory were closed.
But months later, she heard about a charity that helped mothers bring their children home.
Since it is illegal for men of military age to leave Ukraine, Zhornyk and other women, with the help of the charity Save Ukraine, completed a harrowing 5,000km journey in March through Poland, Belarus and Russia to enter to Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine and Crimea to retrieve Artem and 15 other children. They then had to undertake another circuitous journey back.
“There are no words for all the emotions”said 31-year-old Zhornyk, describing his meeting with Artem. “I felt full of excitement and nervous, nervous”.
Since the invasion began in February 2022, thousands of Ukrainian children have been displaced, relocated or forcibly transferred to camps or institutions in Russia or Russian-controlled territory, in what Ukraine and rights advocates have condemned as crimes. of war.
The fate of those children has become a desperate tug-of-war between Ukraine and Russia, and formed the basis of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court charging President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Maria Lvova-Belova, their Commissioner for Children’s Rights, of transferring them illegally.
Ukrainian officials and human rights groups have described these forced transfers as a plan to steal a generation of Ukraine’s youth, turn them into loyal Russian citizens, and eradicate Ukrainian culture to the point of committing genocide.
The Ukrainian government has identified more than 19,000 children it says have been forcibly removed or deported, but experts say the true number is closer to 150,000.
Russia has defended the transfer of the children as a humanitarian effort to rescue them from the war zone.
After the ICC issued the arrest warrant for Lvova-Belova, she said the relatives were free to pick up their children, but only 59 were waiting to go home — a claim Ukrainian officials have dismissed as absurd. .
Already living through the ordeals of Russian occupation, displacement and bombing, the parents have endured months of anxiety, fearful their children would be sent further afield or put up for adoption. And then there is the guilt. Some sent their children to summer camps on the Crimean peninsula, having assured them that they would return in two weeks. Others gave in to pressure from officers and soldiers to let them take their children.
“I felt completely lostsaid Yulia Radzevilova, who brought her son, 12-year-old Maksym Marchenko, home in March after he spent five months in a camp in Crimea. “Nobody supported me. Family, parents, friends started accusing me”.
When Artem didn’t return home, his mother tried to go to Kupiansk to find him, but came back because of heavy shelling. For three weeks, there was no electricity or phone service in his village due to the fighting. Not knowing his whereabouts, she registered him as missing with the police. Then came the phone call from Artem. He said he and his schoolmates, ages 7 to 17, had been taken to a boarding school in Perevalsk, an occupied city in eastern Ukraine.only a few hours away by car, but in a territory isolated by the war.
Founded after Russian forces attacked Crimea in 2014, Save Ukraine was created to move children and their families from occupied areas and places of intense fighting to shelters or new homes. After Ukrainian children were stranded last fall, the group organized rescue missions, including the mothers’ trip to Russian-occupied Ukraine and Crimea.
The group had to navigate hostile police and border controls along the way, which included a flight from Belarus to Moscow and nine hours of questioning by immigration officers at the airport. From Moscow they drove more than 1,600 kilometers to the Crimea.
Zhornyk broke away to go to Perevalsk for Artem. The entire group then traveled back the way they came and back to Ukraine via Belarus. When they got home, the kids were full of stories they didn’t tell on the calls home. There were frequent punishments, as well as pressure to sing the Russian anthem, bullying and insults from other students, the children said.
The children were told that if their parents did not pick them up by this month, six months after their arrival, they would be placed in foster homes or given up for adoption.
Of the 13 children evacuated from the Kupiansk boarding school in September, only two returned to Ukraine, including Artem. Five children remained at the school in Perevalsk, including two girls in the first year.
They were in class when Zhornyk picked up his son. He left without saying goodbye.
CARLOTTA GALL and OLEKSANDR CHUBKO
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6661096, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-14 16:40:08
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