© Reuters. Natalia Rakk smiles as she walks with her 14-year-old daughter Aliona, who went to a Russian-organized summer camp from non-government-controlled territories and was later taken to Russia, after returning over the Ukraine-Belarus border, in the Volyn region. , United Kingdom
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By Anna Dabrowska
UKRAINE/BELARUS BORDER (Reuters) – More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a lengthy operation to bring them home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they had been taken from occupied areas. by Russian forces during the war.
The mothers hugged their sons and daughters as they crossed the border from Belarus into Ukraine on Friday after a complex rescue mission that involved travel through four countries.
Dasha Rakk, a 13-year-old girl, said she and her twin sister agreed to leave the Russian-occupied city of Kherson last year because of the war and go to a holiday camp in Crimea for a few weeks. But once in the Crimea, Russian officials said the children would stay longer.
“They said that we will be adopted, that we will have guardians,” he said. “When they first told us we were staying longer, we all started crying.”
Dasha’s mother, Natalia, said she had traveled from Ukraine to Crimea via Poland, Belarus and Moscow to search for her daughters. The Crimean peninsula in Ukraine has been occupied by Russia since 2014.
“It was terribly difficult, but we kept going, we didn’t sleep at night, we slept sitting up,” he said, describing his trip to the camp.
“It was heartbreaking to see the abandoned children crying behind the fence,” he said.
Kiev estimates that nearly 19,500 children have been taken to Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea since Moscow invaded in February last year, in what it condemns as illegal deportations.
Moscow, which controls parts of eastern and southern Ukraine, denies kidnapping children and says they have been transported for their own safety.
“Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing completion. It was special because of the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity,” said Mykola Kuleba, founder of the Save Ukraine humanitarian organization that helped organize the rescue mission.
Kuleba told a briefing in kyiv on Saturday that the 31 children they brought home said no one in Russia was trying to find their parents.
“There were children who changed locations five times in five months, some children say they were living with rats and cockroaches,” he said. The children were taken to what the Russians call summer camp stays from occupied parts of Ukraine’s Kharkiv and Kherson regions, Kuleba said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
ARREST WARRANTS
Three children, two boys and a girl, were present at the press conference in kyiv. Save Ukraine said they returned home on a previous mission last month that returned 18 children in total.
All three said they had been separated from their parents, who were pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for what was billed as two weeks, from occupied parts of the Kherson and Kharkiv regions.
The children at the briefing said they were forced to stay in summer camps for four to six months and were moved from one place to another during their stay.
“They treated us like animals. They locked us in a separate building,” said Vitaly, a boy from the Kherson region whose age is unclear. He added that they were told that his parents no longer wanted them.
Last month, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of kidnapping children from Ukraine.
Moscow has made no secret of a program under which thousands of Ukrainian children have been taken from occupied areas, but presents it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and abandoned children in the conflict zone.
Russia rejects the ICC’s accusations, saying it does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction and calling the arrest warrants null and void.
Lvova-Belova said earlier this week that her commission acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in an area where military action was taking place and had not moved anyone against their will or that of their parents or legal guardians, whose consent was always sought unless they were missing.
Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer with a Ukrainian NGO called the Regional Center for Human Rights, told the briefing that they were gathering evidence to build a case that Russian officials deliberately prevented the return of the Ukrainian children.
“In each story there is a whole range of international violations and it cannot go unpunished,” he said.