Amid the bombast of Russia’s one-year celebration of its war in Ukraine, a 15-year-old with thick, black hair and a gray hooded jacket was handed a microphone. In front of thousands of cheering people, Anya Naumenko thanked “Uncle Yuri”—a Russian soldier known as Yuri Gagarin—for saving her, her sister, and “hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol,” the Ukrainian city that fell under heavy attack from the first day of Russia’s cross-border invasion, in February 2022.
Having recited words she’d clearly been told to memorize, Anya sheepishly turned to the adults next to her and said, “I forgot a little.”
“Anya,” said a woman in a stop-sign-red coat, quickly covering for the slipup, “don’t be shy! Go hug Uncle Yuri!”
Anya gave the soldier a one-armed side hug as the woman said to a handful of younger children onstage: “Everyone give a hug. Look! It’s the man who saved you all!”
Aired on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, the video was followed by an interview with Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab.
[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]
“It’s absolutely stomach-churning,” Raymond told the CNN host. “That, for me, Anderson, that’s a hostage video.”
Forcibly removed from Ukraine, used as leverage, “reeducated,” and “Russified,” the children at the center of Russia’s agitprop are the potential victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They are, Raymond told me in a recent interview, “pawns in a hostile situation,” and Russia’s treatment of them, far from that of a kind savior, violates the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, among other instruments of international humanitarian law.
Russian authorities have gone so far as to make what appears to be an official, concerted effort to cover the tracks that may lead to the Ukrainian children’s eventual recovery. Processed into the Russian system, the children no longer go by their given names, practice the religions they were raised in, or communicate with their families. They are entered into an adoption system that takes pains to cover up their provenance, an effort that Ukrainian advocates say not only makes the children untraceable, but forms part of a larger project of cultural erasure.
“Hiding that they are Ukrainian in the system shows that the Russians have no intention to ever give them back,” says Onysia Syniuk, a legal analyst at ZMINA, a human-rights organization in Ukraine. “They will make them Russian whatever it takes, even if the children have to stay in orphanages.”
For months, forcibly transferred children, ages four months to 18 years, were listed in a public Russian adoption database without mention of their Ukrainian origin. That they were in the database at all was not widely known until May 31, when the Russian dissident outlet iStories exposed its use in an article alleging that the children were being made to sew camouflage nets for the Russian military, which some were even forced to join.
The iStories revelations prompted Russia to scrub the database of all information about the Ukrainian children. Fortunately, much of it had been scraped by at least one group of open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigators who asked not to be named in order to continue their sensitive work. Such groups are scouring publicly available databases, social media, precision satellite imagery showing the locations of camps, and other sources to track the disappearing Ukrainian children.
The Ukrainian government officially estimates that about 19,500 Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia since the start of the war. The exact number is unknowable, and keeping track of all of the children is nearly impossible—some of the parents have been killed or lost touch with their children as Russia shifts them from place to place.
At the beginning of the war, some parents in eastern Ukraine sent their children to what the Russians told them were summer camps. The parents believed that the camps would keep their children safe, or provide them with enough food to eat, Syniuk says. Reports have since alleged severe abuse at the camps. No matter the conditions, the camps now appear to have been a pretext for luring the children away from their parents and into Russia. As Raymond said: “They can be given caviar every day, riding horsies and having the best day ever, and it’s still a war crime.”
Dozens of these camps are scattered across Russia, according to Conflict Observatory, an American NGO that collects and analyzes evidence of war crimes in Ukraine. The camp farthest from Ukraine is 3,900 miles from the border, in Russia’s Magadan Oblast. The facilities apparently specialize in political reeducation; some reports suggest that military training is also part of their program.
When Ukrainian parents are ready to bring their children home from camp, many are told that the children will remain in Russia, or that there is a “delay.” Some families have managed to recover their children, but only with great difficulty; others report that their children are not allowed to leave, have been transferred to different camps, or have become unreachable. Now, says Veronika Bilkova, an author of an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe report about the forcible transfer of children published in May, “it seems that really the Russian Federation is getting ready, legally speaking, to be able to adopt these [camp] children as well.”
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Not all of the Ukrainian children in Russia came by way of the camps. Others are evacuees, removed by Russian soldiers from areas of Ukraine that Russia’s shelling had made perilous. Anya belonged to this group. Still others were transferred through a process of filtration, in which they were separated from their parents at camps like Bezimenne, in Donetsk, where Russian forces detain and interrogate Ukrainian citizens in Russian-held territories. And then there are the children from Ukrainian orphanages raided by Russian troops, taken across the border to orphanages in Russia.
Many of these supposed orphans actually have parents: In both Ukraine and Russia, families who fall on hard times commonly send their children temporarily to orphanages, experts told me, expecting to later recover them. But once the children are in Russia, according to the OSCE report, “the Russian Federation does not take any steps to actively promote the return of Ukrainian children. Rather, it creates various obstacles for families seeking to get their children back.”
At the moment, the younger the child is, the bleaker the prospects of a return to Ukraine. The only children to have made it home so far, according to legal and human-rights advocates I spoke with, are those old enough to have called their parents or guardians—provided that they have any. Some of those who have made it home reported seeing younger children they knew in Russia—but with the carousel of stolen children still spinning, those sighted likely won’t stay in the same place for long.
Children separated from their parents during wartime have rights under international law, and the warring parties have responsibilities to protect them. Ukrainian children evacuated to Russia, under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, should be allowed to call home, but that’s not always permitted. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) should, under law, have access to all prisoners of war, including children, but little access has been granted.
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Moscow ostensibly allows Ukrainian parents to come collect their children from Russia, but the trip is one that few Ukrainians are in a position to afford or attempt. According to a spokesperson at SOS Children’s Villages International, a nonprofit child-advocacy organization, parents—usually mothers or grandmothers, because men who undertake the trip risk being detained at filtration camps—have to travel through third countries, such as Poland or Belarus, bringing with them extensive documentation proving that the child is theirs. They must secure passports and undergo interviews with the Russian security services. Fewer than 400 children have made it home, according to the Ukrainian government.
Ukrainian NGOs assisting families of missing children face immense obstacles too. “We have some families from the part of the Kherson region that is under occupation now, and we know that they are searching for their children, who were kidnapped, probably,” Anastasiia Pantielieieva, the head of documentation for the Kyiv-based Media Initiative for Human Rights, told me. “But the parents don’t want to speak to us, because they are afraid; there are a great number of Russians on the left bank of the Dnipro River. They refuse to give us any information, because they are afraid for their lives.” Meanwhile, many of the parents who willingly sent their children to Russian “summer camps” are reluctant to come forward in Ukraine, because they fear retribution from compatriots who may see them as traitors.
Ukraine recently announced the creation of a DNA database for the missing children, documenting their disappearance and the existence of their relatives in Ukraine. For the database to yield matches in Russia, however, a parallel effort will have to take place on the other side of the border, something the ICRC could theoretically assist Ukraine with in POW or displaced-persons camps, but which will prove far more difficult for children who have been laundered into the Russian adoption system.
In the topsy-turvy world that is today’s Russia, Ukraine is the party guilty of using Ukrainian children as instruments of war. Maria Lvova-Belova, Vladimir Putin’s commissioner for children’s rights, told Vice News that in the display with Anya, “there is no question of any propaganda.”
“We don’t use children for politics,” she said. “There [in Ukraine], unfortunately, it happens.”
Yet on June 14, Lvova-Belova appeared on Russian TV with her teenage “son,” Philip, who had escaped Mariupol during the invasion. He’d told Russian guards at a checkpoint that he had no parents. They sent him to Donetsk. He later ended up in Moscow, where Lvova-Belova “adopted” him (recently, perhaps for legal reasons, she has switched to saying that she is “fostering” him). The day after the TV show, Lvova-Belova wrote on a Russian social-media platform about Philip: “Our history with him is not simple, but it’s very sincere, it’s very true. We were talking about our difficulties, which we overcame, and our small victories. We said that love overcomes everything.”
During the TV appearance, the host said to Philip, as tragic music played: “I recently visited your city. I wanted to tell you honestly that the city I saw is sad and scary.” In the hall of mirrors that is Russian propaganda, Mariupol was destroyed by Ukrainians, despite its being their own city.
[Eliot A. Cohen: It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.]
Philip told the host about hiding in a Mariupol basement with his guardian—an uncle—who drank more each day. He decided he couldn’t deal with his alcoholic uncle anymore, and so he fled. Looking relaxed in a white T-shirt that read get off, he told the interviewer about his present life with Lvova-Belova: “I think, more or less, now I’m part of the family.”
In March, the International Criminal Court issued its first arrest warrants in relation to the war. They were for Putin and Lvova-Belova, for the war crime of “unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
The Russian government seems to be trying to stay ahead of its potential legal problems by shifting its laws on citizenship and adoption. A May 2022 presidential decree allows Russians who currently claim guardianship of Ukrainian children to secure Russian citizenship for those children upon request. The effect could be to attenuate the future claims of Ukraine or Ukrainians on children absorbed into Russia and made into Russians without their consent.
Russia’s legal tricks have played out before the eyes of some Ukrainian parents. Elina Steinerte, an author of the OSCE report, told me about the case of a father who was separated from three of his children during filtration. “He later learned that the day he was detained, the children were put on a plane to Moscow,” Steinerte said. One of them managed to call their father and tell him that they were about to be put in an institution for adoption. Because their father was in detention, the Russians considered the children to be without parents—which made them “most certainly eligible, very much in inverted commas,” Steinerte said, “to be put in an institution, which can be thousands of kilometers away.”
Moscow is apparently working quickly and cleverly to make the deported Ukrainian children disappear into Russia. But lawyers, child advocates, parents, and OSINT groups around the world are laboring just as feverishly to track the children down before doing so becomes impossible.
“They have a gun to the head of these kids,” Raymond said of the Russians. “We’re the SWAT team outside the bank.”