The 15-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl was kidnapped on a warm morning last October.
Like everyone else in Kherson, a city at the mouth of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, Yevgenia’s family was still adjusting to life under Russian control. Putin’s tanks and troops had poured into the city seven months earlier, just after the invasion of Ukraine began.
Now there were checkpoints, military police, rumors of Russian brutality; of women being raped. Ukraine was fighting to retake the city and there was a constant threat of shelling. Few people went out after 5pm.
At the apartment where the teen lived with her mother, Maryna, 37, a clerk at a clothing store; her father Oleskii, 36, a seaman; and her seven-year-old sister, the atmosphere was tense. When her teacher invited Yevheniia and her classmates to a two-week vacation in Crimea on the Black Sea, she jumped at the chance.
“I went far away from the war with my friends,” she tells me now.
Like everyone else in Kherson, a city at the mouth of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine, Yevgenia’s family was still adjusting to life under Russian control. Pictured: Yevhenila (left) and mother Maryna Kondratieva (right)
When her teacher invited Yevheniia (pictured) and her classmates to Crimea on the Black Sea for a two-week vacation, she jumped at the chance
Although Crimea had been under Russian control since 2014, it was safer than Kherson. It was warm, even in autumn. All her friends went with her – and the trip was free. Yevheniia’s teacher told her parents it was safe and the best thing they could do for their daughter. They agreed: she should go and have fun.
On the morning of October 7, Maryna, Yevheniia and other teenagers gathered with their families in the port of Kherson. The parents waved goodbye as their children boarded a ferry across the Dnipro. On the other side, they were picked up by a bus that took them to the Evpatoria camp in western Crimea.
Yevheniia reached a building that looked like a hotel. “Really smart,” she says. Sharing a bedroom with three friends, she settled into the holiday routine: morning gymnastics, then team games like volleyball or soccer, followed by art—“I made sculpture!”—and an evening of dancing and singing. “It was really good,” she says.
After two weeks, Yevheniia was almost sad to go home. But then something unexpected happened. Their teacher said they weren’t going home yet. The vacation will be extended by about a week, she said. “She did that a few times, over and over again,” Yevheniia recalls.
Then she learned the truth. A Russian assistant secretly gathered the children in small groups. He told them to forget any thought of going on an extended vacation. “You are here,” he told them, “because you cannot leave this place.”
Yevhaniia is one of more than 6,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and sent to camps in Russia or Russian-occupied territory since the beginning of the war. For the past three months, I’ve been working with the help of the Kiev-based charity Save Ukraine to track down families affected by this little-publicized atrocity.
Yevhaniia (left) is one of more than 6,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and sent to camps in Russia or Russian-occupied territory since the start of the war
The estimate of 6,000 comes from a Yale University report, which acknowledges that it’s a conservative number and probably just the tip of the iceberg.
The National Information Bureau, set up by the Ukrainian government in 2022 to collect data on prisoners of war, dead and missing, including civilians, says that as of this writing, 19,000 Ukrainian children have been illegally deported to Russia and only 364 have been rescued earlier this year month.
Yale researchers uncovered a network of 43 facilities, including a psychiatric hospital, to which Ukrainian children were transferred, mostly in Crimea and southern Russia, although some are further afield — for example, in Magadan in the Far East, nearly 2,500 miles from Ukraine .
According to the report, the youngest kidnapped was four months old; the eldest 17.
In March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, for their alleged complicity in the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children, which the court recognized as war crimes.
There is evidence that Putin has authorized Lvova-Belova to launch a large and far-reaching child deportation program and that all levels of the Russian government are involved in the operation.
In March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin (left) and Maria Lvova-Belova (right), Russia’s child rights commissioner, for alleged complicity in the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children
There is evidence that Putin authorized Lvova-Belova (pictured) to launch a large and far-reaching program to deport children
Part one of the strategy is the “child transfer” – effectively a pipeline to bring children from Ukraine to Russia. They are abducted from orphanages and children’s homes; They are separated from their parents in “filtration camps” — places where Ukrainians are held and interrogated in areas under Russian occupation — or, as in the case of Yevheniia, sent to holiday camps that the parents believe are actually run by the Russian are state-funded entities.
Next comes “re-education” and “indoctrination,” in which children are brainwashed into adopting a pro-Russian worldview. This includes courses based on the Russian curriculum, lectures by veterans and even military training.
Finally, in some cases, forced adoption occurs. Laws that the Russian government has accelerated to enforce since the start of the war have made it easier for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children – and families who do so are receiving a financial reward of up to £160 a month.
“None of the decrees issued by Putin contain a paragraph or rule that says that the child’s consent or opinion is required,” said Oksana Filipishina, a representative of the Ukrainian Human Rights Union Helsinki.
“These are essentially unilateral acts of violence aimed at transferring children from one ethnic group to another.” And that is a sign of genocide.”
Yevheniia says she had to sing the Russian anthem every morning during exercises (in some camps the Russian anthem is played on a loop for hours). But, she says, the mood really changed when she was moved to a second, smaller and less fancy camp in a converted nursery.
Yevheniia (left) says she had to sing the Russian anthem every morning during exercises (in some camps the Russian anthem is played on a loop for hours).
There she was brainwashed with the Russian narrative that Ukraine was run by Nazis and Russian speakers were oppressed.
“I was told: ‘You have no opinion of your own, you are a Nazi, a fascist. We are here to save you. We share our bread, our water with you. you should be thankful And you’re not grateful.” She says.
The camp leaders wore T-shirts with the letter “Z”, a propaganda motif for the war. Some camps had isolation rooms where children were sent as punishment if their views were deemed too pro-Ukrainian. In the camps, “difficult” children were also subdued and drugged in order to control them.
Olga Zaporozhchenko and her husband Denis, a construction worker from Kherson, sent three of their four children to a camp in Crimea on October 6.
“Their school was destroyed by shelling,” her mother explains. “They only had online classes and their teacher said it was a chance for them to have a quality time with their friends.”
They were told the children would return in two weeks but did not come home.
The camp leaders wore T-shirts with the letter “Z” (pictured), a propaganda motif for the war
Diana, 14, and Yana, 11, say they were treated well and even got sweets from locals for Christmas. But in early February, her brother Nikita, a boisterous 10-year-old, got into a fight with some older boys who were helpers in the camp and were believed to be pro-Russian. Nikita was taken to the hospital.
“Nurses came into the room and gave me a small plastic cup with a pill in it and some water and told me to take it,” he says. The pill – probably Valium, a tranquilizer – made him “drowsy”. He was in the hospital for a month. Two other children from the camp were in the same hospital and were also sedated.
The family is now in Kiev, reunited with their children who have been away for a full six months. During this time, regular phone messages from “helpers” kept Olga and Denis up to date and knew that Nikita had been drugged.
They are reluctant to criticize their son’s treatment for fear of reprisals, but we can imagine the overwhelming fear, confusion and anger they must have felt when their children didn’t come home.
“We didn’t know what to do,” says Olga. ‘My [fourth child] is only five and I couldn’t leave him in Kherson – and we were worried that Denis would leave [in search of them]’He would not be left behind.’ They ended up giving power of attorney to a friend who found and picked up their children for them.
When Yevhenija’s return was delayed, Maryna called her teacher. “She said she knew from the start it wouldn’t be two weeks. It would take several months, but she kept it a secret.’
Olga Zaporozhchenko (back center) and her husband Denis (back left), a construction worker from Kherson, sent three of their four children to a camp in Crimea on October 6
When Yevhenija’s return was delayed, Maryna (pictured) called her teacher. “She said she knew from the start it wouldn’t be two weeks. It would take several months, but she kept it a secret.
Maryna says it’s hard to know who is pro-Russian in occupied Kherson; who to trust, who to believe. She was both scared and angry. ‘I cried a lot. “I couldn’t sleep,” she says.
She contacted a camp official. “When is my daughter coming home?” she asked. The official informed Maryna that her daughter would not be returned to Kherson.
She was welcome to pick up Yevheniia, he said, but the journey would be a one-way street. “We were offered a residence permit and a financial reward if we left everything we had in Ukraine and stayed in Crimea,” she says. “A lot of parents were okay with that.”
According to the Yale report, parents face an incredible struggle not only to reunite with their children but even to find out where they are. They are often shuffled back and forth between camps without their parents’ knowledge. A child was taken from a camp in Crimea to the Republic of Adygea, several hours away.
Yevheniya was lucky. Although she was sent to three camps, they were all in the same city. She also had her mobile phone. She and her mother kept in touch through the Telegram app.
“Reception wasn’t always good, so I had to wander around to find a signal,” she says.
She contacted a camp official. “When is my daughter coming home?” she asked. The official informed Maryna that her daughter would not be returned to Kherson
A turning point came in February when one of Yevheniia’s roommates was reunited with her mother thanks to Save Ukraine, which helps Ukrainians with evacuations, humanitarian aid and housing refugees. Yevheniia asked her mother to find out more about it.
Save Ukraine has a hotline for parents to use to report missing children. It also has a network of informants in Russia.
“Just today a man from Russia contacted me on Facebook to tell me about a Ukrainian child who was deported to Dagestan in the southernmost tip of Russia,” says Mykola Kuleba, CEO of Save Ukraine. “He asked me, ‘How can I help this kid?’
The charity organized a rescue mission for Maryna and twelve parents and guardians of other missing children. At the beginning of March they set out. The Evpatoria camp was only about 250 miles from Kherson, but it was too dangerous for them to travel there directly as the route was close to the front line.
Instead, Maryna took a train to Kiev, where she was informed by the Ukrainian security service. The statements of the parents are submitted to the International Criminal Court. Then she boarded a train to Poland and continued on to Belarus. She flew from Minsk to Moscow, and then went to Crimea by bus from Moscow.
The journey of more than 2,600 miles took ten days.
Instead, Maryna took a train to Kiev, where she was informed by the Ukrainian security service
Finally, on March 17, she reached the Zdravnitsa camp (Russian for “spa”) in Yevpatoria. After proving her identity and providing documents such as birth certificates, Maryna was reunited with her daughter. They had been separated for almost six months.
“As I sat on the bus, I cried and imagined what it would be like when we met,” she says. “But when I saw Yevheniia, it was pure happiness and joy. ‘No more tears.’
“I was afraid that I would never see Mama again,” says Yevheniia. “They said if the children weren’t picked up by a certain date, we would be sent to an orphanage.”
When children are kidnapped, “we have to act immediately,” says Mykola Kuleba. If they are sent to an orphanage, they can quickly be adopted by a Russian family. Their names can be changed so that they can no longer be found. And when children get Russian passports, they cannot leave the country.
“We don’t know how many thousands have already been adopted,” he says.
On March 22, Maryna and her daughter arrived back in Kiev after a five-day journey.
On March 22, Maryna and her daughter arrived back in Kiev after a five-day journey
Save Ukraine has rescued 96 children so far and recently launched its seventh mission: ten mothers left Kyiv on May 13 to rescue 23 children from camps in Crimea.
Each mission is expensive, but Save Ukraine secures documents and covers all travel expenses. It’s also dangerous. Maryna was interrogated by the domestic intelligence agency FSB for nine hours at Moscow airport. “They checked my phone and documents and asked why I was in Russia.”
Save Ukraine informs each parent before departure. “Every mother has her own story, her cover,” says Olga Yerokhina, Mykola Kuleba’s assistant. “For example, I came to visit my sister, or I came to visit my relative and bring my child home.” The most important thing is not to mention Save Ukraine, she says. “It’s easier for the mothers if they don’t talk about us.”
The charity recently opened a hope and healing center in Kyiv where families can stay for three months. It offers food, playroom and trauma therapy. The effects on the children are enormous, says Olga.
“They don’t want to talk to anyone at first.” They’re like little hedgehogs, very closed inside. It takes two to three months before they feel really safe again.”
A young girl arrived with cuts on her hands and arms, evidence of self-harm, Olga continues. She wore a T-shirt with a Ukrainian flag in the camp.
“One of the helpers asked her to cut it into pieces.” She refused. He said, “You have three choices.” You cut it into pieces. “You’re going back to Kherson, where your mother will have big problems” – by which he meant that Russian soldiers could come to their house and do whatever they wanted because there were no laws. “And third, you go to a separate room to be punished.” She was afraid he would rape her. She was so scared.’
Maryna and her family decided to settle in Kiev. The city of Kherson was retaken from Ukraine, “but it’s not safe,” she says.
“It’s not over yet,” she continues. “There are many fears – finding a job, housing, school.” In addition, Kiev has been hit by Russian airstrikes several times this month. “But we’re family again,” she says, “and we’re unbreakable.”