35,000, it is the number of Ukrainian children who have disappeared who would be retained in Russia or in the occupied territories, depending on the estimates of a team of researchers from the humanitarian research laboratory (HRL) of the Yale University. These children were reportedly kidnapped by Russian forces on the battlefield in Ukraine, or directly withdrawn from their families by coercion.
The Guardian reports that some families of missing Ukrainian children therefore take considerable risks trying to find them: a Ukrainian mother, called Natalia, told the English daily her testimony to the dramatic rescue of her two teenage sons, detained in a camp in Russia for almost six months.
After the occupation of Kherson by Russian forces in September 2022, a neighbor of Natalia advised him to send his sons to a children’s camp in Anapa, a Russian seaside resort. “The 21-day trip was free and they had to return to Kherson at the end,” she says. The boys wanted to go there too, but I made a serious mistake by allowing them. ” At the end of 2022, the Ukrainian forces released the city of Natalia, but her children were in a camp on the other side of the front line and the organizers refused to let them return home.
With the help of a Ukrainian organization, Natalia finally managed to obtain a passport and Ukrainian identity papers for her children. She then crossed the border alone to the Russian city of Anapa, on the north coast of the Black Sea, passing many border posts where she was to explain to Russian soldiers the reasons for her presence in the country. After having traveled for six days under the bombing, Natalia finally regained her children in February 2023.
Proven war crimes
According to the Ukrainian organization Bring Kids…
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