Mariupol. A city of almost half a million people on the coast of the Azov Sea. As of Feb.24, 2022, 60 000 children lived in the city. How many of them did Russia steal on the pretext of rescue? Did the children have a choice? Who stood behind the deportations of Ukrainian children? How far did the Russians go? Mariupol is located forty kilometers from the Russian border. The Livoberezhnyi District is one of the first to come under fire from the Russian military. Tetiana's children - Oleksandr, K
arina and Danylo - are alone at home. The children go and stay with family friends who live in a house with a safe basement. Oleksandr has a cough and is vomiting blood. He manages to say that he is having trouble breathing before losing consciousness. His neighbors find a car to take him to a local hospital. Meanwhile, the Kuchuhurin family is fleeing Russian shelling in another district of Mariupol. The city loses mobile connection, electricity, and heating. Sofia, along with her mother, broth
er, and sister, move in with a family friend. To get food, water, and coal, they go to one of the steel mills that still has supplies. Sofia's brother cannot be rescued from the rubble and dies on the spot. Ivan and Maksym are orphans. Anton Bilai is their guardian. He is the director of the Mariupol technical college the boys attend. Anton lives with his family near the student dormitory. When the power goes out in the city and the boys can no longer cook for themselves, Anton comes to their ai
d. Shelling around the area is getting more intense. Anton makes his way out of the city with his family and has to leave Ivan and Maksym behind. Ukrainian police officers in armored vehicles then take the boys to a shelter in the center of Mariupol. Not far from the boys' shelter is the Drama Theater, where hundreds of people are sheltering. A few days later, the Russian military drops a bomb on the theater. Ivan and Maksym decide to leave Mariupol on foot. Mariupol has had no mobile service fo
r over a week. Since March 2, people have been living in isolation. According to our information, around 600 people contacted the hotline of Ukraine’s Ombudsman during the first month of the war. They were searching for the more than 2,000 Mariupol residents they had lost contact with. Oleksandr is brought to a hospital in Mariupol where there are still working doctors and patients. He has injuries to his chest, spine, spinal cord, a fractured shoulder blade, rib and a shell fragment has passed
through his lung. After Oleksandr is treated, the children return to their apartment. Many videos published at the time indicate that Russian troops had already occupied their neighborhood so the fighting was less active. Donetsk is a city in eastern Ukraine captured by Russian-controlled forces in 2014. The city is the administrative center of the occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast. It has played a key role in the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. A local volunteer is supposed to bring
Oleksandr to Donetsk. But he leaves the boy in one of the local hospitals on the way to the occupied city. The next day, Oleksandr is taken to Donetsk. Karina and their younger brother go with him. Valya calls all possible hotlines. She even reaches out to representatives of the occupation authorities in Donetsk. Her sisters are currently living with a friend of their deceased mother. But the girls cannot stay with her for long. In Mariupol, the girls contracted shingles. They are brought to th
e district hospital nearby. Ivan and Maksym are heading toward Zaporizhzhia – the nearest large city under Ukrainian control. On the way, Russian troops stop them at a checkpoint. The boys decide to take a break before continuing their journey. Their plans are disrupted by a local doctor. She finds out that the children are orphans and calls an occupation official from Donetsk. The woman Ivan mentions is Olena Verbovska. She is the Russian-controlled head of social services for families and chil
dren in occupied Donetsk. Since 2014, Verbovska has been taking children from occupied eastern Ukraine to summer camps in Russia, occupied Crimea, and to visit the Christmas tree in Moscow during the holidays. That evening, Olena Verbovska takes Ivan and Maksym to Children's Hospital No. 5 in Donetsk. Ivan is able to connect to the Internet and calls hotlines to get in touch with the Ukrainian authorities. After getting in touch with the authorities, the process to bring the boys back begins. W
e found that children from Mariupol were held in at least nine hospitals in Donetsk. Not all children were in need of treatment. Some hospitals were just stops before the children were sent further away. Kateryna Rashevska is a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights. She has collected evidence of the deportation of Ukrainian children for the International Criminal Court. As Rashevska explains, deportation was widespread. Children from the occupied territories were also brought to hospita
ls in Russia. To bring back deported children, relatives were forced to go to occupied Donetsk. Russian-controlled officials would not agree to hand over the children otherwise. The relatives had to go through European countries and Russia to get to Donetsk as there are no checkpoints on the front line. Svitlana Dubchak, Tetiana's mother, agrees to go get the children. At that point, she had been living and working in Poland for several years. Only some people manage to bring their children home
. There is no one system for parents or human rights activists. The volunteers of the Save Ukraine charity foundation do not disclose the ways in which they take children out of Russia and the occupied territories, but they have already brought back more than a hundred children. For Anton Bilai, who recently fled Mariupol, there was no question he wouldn’t try to bring the boys back. He is the sole legal guardian of the two orphans. Around the same time, Valia was also preparing to leave for the
occupied territories. She manages to quickly get custody of both sisters. Karina finds her brother in a children's hospital. He complains that the nurses do not respond when he asks them to turn him over. His bedsores are getting bigger. The hospital has also put him on a specific diet for no reason, as we later found out. On top of that, the hospital is planning to amputate his leg, according to his family. Social services of the Russian-led occupation authorities have similar plans for Sofia
and Nastia. While Valia is on her way to pick up her sisters in occupied Donetsk, a family comes to meet the girls at the hospital. On the way to Donetsk, Valentyna gets in touch with Svitlana Maiboroda. She is the Moscow-controlled head of all social services for families and children in the occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast. They agree that Valentyna will come get the children. Svitlana Maiboroda is a Ukrainian official who stayed on after Russia occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast. Since the begi
nning of the full-scale invasion, Maiboroda and her colleagues have been involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. In May 2022, when the fighting for Mariupol was still ongoing, Maiboroda visited the city. She recruited employees for social services now under Russian control. On the eve of Anton's arrival in Donetsk, Svitlana Maiboroda calls Ivan. After that, Svitlana Maiboroda calls Anton as well. The rest of the children who are in the same hospital with the boys are not giv
en a choice. From the Donetsk hospital, the children are taken to a children's center. From there, they are taken to the Russian city of Rostov, and then to the Polyany children’s camp in the suburbs of Moscow. The same place where Ivan and Maksym were offered to go. The children are supposed to stay there for a month. Maria Lvova-Belova is behind the organization of the so-called “recreation” and "rehabilitation" of children. She is a high-ranking official close to Russian dictator Vladimir Put
in. A few months before the start of the full-scale invasion, she was appointed as Commissioner for Children's Rights in Russia. Lvova-Belova calls the deportation of Ukrainian children “salvation.” She personally travels to Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, takes children, and hands them off to Russian families. Lvova-Belova also became the guardian of a boy from Mariupol, Pylyp Holovnya. Philip is Maria Lvova-Belova's 10th foster child. On May 30, 2022, Putin signed a decree that orphan
s from the occupied territories can obtain Russian citizenship under a simplified procedure. Pylyp was taken to Russia along with 30 other children. Our editorial office received a list of the children. We discovered that some of these children were from Mariupol. Thirteen of them were either orphans or wards of the state. In total, we identified at least twenty children who were sent to the children’s camp in the suburbs of Moscow. We wrote to some of them on social media asking to talk to them
. Our team did not receive any responses, the messages were blocked, and the children’s names were changed on their social media accounts. We asked Ivan and Maksym to look at the photos of the children we identified. We found out that the girl Ivan was talking about is still in Russia with her brother. She wrote on social media that she will probably spend the rest of her life there. The boys confirmed that some of the children on the list were in the same hospital with them. Ivan still keeps in
touch with some of them. For security reasons, we cannot disclose their names. According to documents seen by our team, 31 children were taken to Russia by Kyrylo Potylitsyn. He is the temporary head of the Children's Center in Russian-occupied Donetsk. Potylitsyn works under Svitlana Maiboroda. He supposedly worked as a legal consultant at the children's center. His job responsibilities included the legal protection of children. The children were accompanied by two other women. One of them,
like Potylitsyn, worked in a Donetsk children's center. The operation to deport children from occupied Donetsk to Russia was not the only one in which Potylitsyn's colleagues were involved. We found that another group of children was taken to the Rostov region a few days before the full-scale invasion. Yanina Tertychna is a prosecutor who has been investigating the deportation of Ukrainian children since the beginning of Russia's full scale invasion. Oleksandr's grandmother is the first to get t
o Donetsk. The boy has already undergone surgery in the neurosurgery department of a local hospital. They removed shrapnel from his body and made preparations to return him to the children's hospital. At this time, Tetiana, Oleksandr's mother, managed to arrange for her son to be treated in Georgia. All that was left was for the boy to be discharged from the hospital. We found that this conversation took place between Svitlana and Oleksandr's doctor, Maksym Vakulenko. Since 2017, Vakulenko has b
een traveling to Russia to attend medical conferences where he represented the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. During active battles for Mariupol, Vakulenko went to the city to work at the regional hospital. He also received humanitarian aid from a member of the Russian State Duma. Another doctor who refused to send Oleksandr abroad for treatment was Serhiy Serov, head of the surgical department at the children's hospital. In Georgia, Oleksandr is admitted to a children's hospital. Dr. Levan
Kharashvili manages to treat Oleksandr's bedsores, and stabilize his condition. Then Oleksandr is being transferred to Germany for rehabilitation. His condition is improving. But now it feels like everything has stopped for him. He can no longer walk as a result of the injuries he suffered. In Berlin, we're going with Oleksandr and Tetiana to see a doctor. We thought it would be just another checkup. Valya manages to quickly get the children. But while leaving Donetsk, she is asked to return to
the city and undergo filtration. During this procedure, people’s documents are checked and they are interrogated under duress. Anton picks up Ivan and Maksym from the same hospital. He comes to pick them up in the morning, signs the documents, and returns to Ukraine with the children through other European countries. The children who were taken to a boarding house near Moscow for a month have not returned. We know for sure that their relatives in Ukraine are looking for them. For security reason
s, we cannot disclose their names. So far, only four children from the list have been brought home to Ukraine. We called Svitlana Maiboroda. She is a Moscow-controlled official from the Russian-occupied territory who was involved in the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. We discovered that at least 14 children on the list were placed in foster care in Russian families. All of them are residents of the Moscow region. We found that children were mostly given to families who already had f
oster children. According to Russian media, a boy from Mariupol, Bohdan Yermokhin, was placed in a family with 11 children. His foster mother, Iryna Rudnytska, is a former volunteer in the Chechen war. After several months, Bohdan tried to escape from Rudnytska's family to his relatives in Ukraine. He was detained at the Belarusian border and brought back to Russia. During more than a year of war, Ukrainian authorities were able to identify almost 20,000 children who were deported to Russia. As
of early 2023, most of them were from the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, volunteers and Ukrainian authorities have brought home about 400 children. The actual number of deportees is likely much higher. Russia does not provide Ukraine with lists of children they have deported. The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of deporting children to Russia. Ukraine may request their ar
rest if they cross the border into countries that recognize the ICC's ruling. Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!
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