> When Russian soldiers told 14-year-old Vova Petukhov that he and his younger brother Sasha had 30 minutes to pack to move to Russia, he thought he would not see Ukraine again. “We were thinking then we would never come home,” he said. > > The boys, whose mother had died a few months before the war, were among 200 children stranded at Novopetrivka boarding school, a facility for disadvantaged children, near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine when the Russians occupied the area on March 12, 2022, 16 days after their full-scale invasion. > > While most of the pupils were rescued by parents or relatives, Vova and Sasha were among 15 orphans left hiding in the basement for three months with no power or water and dwindling supplies. With them were the headmistress and a few staff. > > “It was terrifying,” said Sasha who was 11 at the time. “We were scared of the explosions and shootings and when we heard helicopters we ran to the basement and couldn’t come out” > > Their situation would soon worsen. Like thousands of Ukrainian children, the boys were abducted to Russia — part of a programme to re-educate them and turn them into Russians. > > > Last year the International Criminal Court declared this a war crime, issuing arrest warrants for President Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his children’s commissioner, who boasted of taking 720,000 Ukrainian children, including one she adopted herself. > > No one knows the true figure because many were orphans with no relatives or whose parents were killed — Ukraine puts it far lower, at about 20,000. > > Fewer than 600 have been rescued. The Petukhov boys are among the lucky ones, returning earlier this month. > > But Mykola Kuleba, head of Save Ukraine, the organisation which brought them back, and rescued its 414th child last week, believes many of these children will never return. “It’s now almost impossible to get the kids out,” he said. “Our government is trying through mediation by Qatar and the Emiratis but it’s very slow as Putin is trying to block any returns. He clearly understands every child abducted is a witness to war crimes.” > > That is not all. The indoctrination is working. “It’s two and a half years now where they are at Russian schools and taught every day Russia is a great country and Ukraine is bad. The longer we leave them the more assimilated they are and the harder it is to get them back. Some contact us through our hotline saying they want to come home. But we have more and more Ukrainian children who when we track down say ‘we want to stay in Russia because Ukraine is at war and we received Russian citizenship and don’t want to come back’.” > > Vova and Sasha, now 16 and 13, say they cried with happiness about their return. Sitting on a bed under a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag, in their Uncle Roman’s house where they now live in the peaceful village of Dobre, near Mykolaiv, they recounted their ordeal. > > In mid-July 2022, Russian soldiers came to the basement of the boarding school, counted them all and forced the children onto military vehicles, along with the school’s director, Natalia Lutsyk. They drove them to Kherson, the biggest Ukrainian city to come under occupation. > > “They filmed us and made a video saying they were evacuating us to safety,” said Vova. In fact they were taking them against their will and close to the front line. > > The terrified orphans, 11 boys and four girls aged between seven and 16, were placed in a centre for child social and psychological rehabilitation in the village of Stepanivka, just outside Kherson – a city that Ukraine has since liberated. > > That facility was empty because its director, Volodomyr Sahaidak, had hidden the children with friends and colleagues, fearful the Russians would take them. “We saw Russian propagandists saying that they needed to take children to send to military schools, indoctrinate them and let them fight for Russia,” he told The Sunday Times last year. “I knew they had taken children in 2014 after annexing Crimea and the Donbas and understood the same thing would happen.” > Advertisement > > He was right. On September 30, 2022, Putin triumphantly declared that Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were now part of the Russian federation along with the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, which Russia had occupied since 2014. > > The first thing the occupiers did was open schools. Another recently rescued boy, Zhenya, 15, told how at his school in Kherson they had to sing the anthem every day, were forbidden to use the word war and on Russian Defenders Day, were told to make socks for Russian soldiers and write them postcards. One day military recruitment officers came to the school and issued them military cards. “They told us we will get free houses, a salary up to a million roubles, and that when it got warmer they would return and take us children to the fields to dig trenches.” > > Vova and Sasha did not go to school because they had teachers with them. They had been in the centre four months when on October 19, a bus pulled up. “It was all very sudden. We were just going to have lunch when we were told by the headmistress you have 30 minutes to pack as we are going to cross the Dnipro river on vacation for two weeks,” said Vova. “I didn’t believe her.” > > He was right. They never came back. “Only after we left were we told we were going to Russia,” he said. > > It was a two-day journey, by boat across the Dnipro, then road to Crimea, then train. They ended up at a sanatorium in Anapa, a resort on the northern shore of the Black Sea known as the Pearl of Russia. > Advertisement > > There they found around 200 other children from Kherson. There were classes in patriotism. They had no real lessons, said Vova, just basic things, chanting times tables and checking handwriting. Any mentions of Ukraine were negative. “They wanted us to become Russians,” said Sasha. > > Vova feared he would be sent to military school to fight. Some children were taken to Moscow to impress them with the city’s grandeur and size and told they could go to great universities. Vova refused to go. > > They were among the lucky ones who got out. Before the Russian invasion, an American family had done the paperwork for the adoption of one of their group of 15. Somehow they tracked the group down and eventually extracted them all to Georgia. > > From the start, the brothers’ Uncle Roman had been trying to find them. They had lost touch when the power went off shortly after the invasion. But scouring groups on Facebook and other social media about the missing, he saw a photograph when they were transferred to Kherson. > > Eventually he made contact with Save Ukraine who got them and three others back from Georgia — the others have no guardians. “I am so happy to have them back,” he said outside the tumbledown house where he survives through odd jobs such as gardening as well as growing potatoes. Like much of the region the power was off after attacks on energy infrastructure and the house sweltering in 38C. > Advertisement > > But it is not easy. Even though they had some time in Georgia to recover, he says they have nightmares. So traumatised were they by their experience that the whoosh from opening a bottle of fizzy water makes Sasha jump. > > The lasting effects of this were all too evident at a special camp near Lutsk in northwest Ukraine for children who have been rescued from forced abduction or occupation. > > Fifty children aged seven to 17, most of whom have spent between one and two years under Russian control, were brought together in mid-July for 11 days of sport, activities, Harry Potter movies and intensive psychotherapy. > > From a distance they looked like any children as they queued for candy floss then jumped to catch blue and yellow streamers cascading from a blower. But most were pale and thin faced, a result, say therapists, of extended periods of deprivation and lack of sleep from shelling. > > Those running the camp say the previous eight camps they worked at were for children processing grief after losing one or both parents, often as they watched. > > “This is our hardest camp yet,” said Oksana Lebedeva, who set up Gen Ukrainian, which runs the camps. “These kids have something in their eyes which is different, they look at you as if they are adults with very old eyes. > > “Under occupation and in deportation they were constantly checked and punished,” she added. “They agree to everything — it’s submission on the verge of despair. Here we have strict rules and timetable, no phones, go to group therapy, and they do it all without protesting even the teenagers.” > > “Children who return from Russian occupation are like mini-soldiers,” said Vannui Martyrosian, 33, the lead psychologist sitting with her black labrador Lola, who she jokes is the main therapist. But even on Lola, war has taken its toll. She has turned grey and developed epilepsy because of the stress of shelling and air raid sirens. > > “They are all very well behaved in a negative way, fearful of being even a minute late. It’s painful to see.” > > Unlike previous camps, she said, “This time it took us much longer to develop contact with these children as adults are a source of danger for them.”
Misleading headline.
Putin did *not* steal these Ukrainian kids.
It was **ordinary** Russians-cum-mobiks who first kidnapped these kids, and **ordinary** Russians on the home front who then got to work by “adopting” these kids and running “summer camps” and “schools” to turn them into Russians.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is textbook Russification with the open and willing participation of ordinary Russians.
No excuses.
Its sad how news fatigue has numbed Europeans to the sheer scope of the catastrophe of Russia’s bloody imperialist war. We have huge numbers of deaths, abduction and indoctrination of children (genocide), bombing of civilian infrastructure and housing, and we are not even providing the best we can do of *defensive* equipment and weapons, not to speak of what is needed to take back territory. For all the tragedy in Gaza, which of course also needs addressing, I feel Europe is really dropping the ball on the biggest armed conflict on our soil since WW2. Putin’s biggest win so far is making us *accept* that we now have war on our continent.
5 comments
> When Russian soldiers told 14-year-old Vova Petukhov that he and his younger brother Sasha had 30 minutes to pack to move to Russia, he thought he would not see Ukraine again. “We were thinking then we would never come home,” he said.
>
> The boys, whose mother had died a few months before the war, were among 200 children stranded at Novopetrivka boarding school, a facility for disadvantaged children, near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine when the Russians occupied the area on March 12, 2022, 16 days after their full-scale invasion.
>
> While most of the pupils were rescued by parents or relatives, Vova and Sasha were among 15 orphans left hiding in the basement for three months with no power or water and dwindling supplies. With them were the headmistress and a few staff.
>
> “It was terrifying,” said Sasha who was 11 at the time. “We were scared of the explosions and shootings and when we heard helicopters we ran to the basement and couldn’t come out”
>
> Their situation would soon worsen. Like thousands of Ukrainian children, the boys were abducted to Russia — part of a programme to re-educate them and turn them into Russians.
>
>
> Last year the International Criminal Court declared this a war crime, issuing arrest warrants for President Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his children’s commissioner, who boasted of taking 720,000 Ukrainian children, including one she adopted herself.
>
> No one knows the true figure because many were orphans with no relatives or whose parents were killed — Ukraine puts it far lower, at about 20,000.
>
> Fewer than 600 have been rescued. The Petukhov boys are among the lucky ones, returning earlier this month.
>
> But Mykola Kuleba, head of Save Ukraine, the organisation which brought them back, and rescued its 414th child last week, believes many of these children will never return. “It’s now almost impossible to get the kids out,” he said. “Our government is trying through mediation by Qatar and the Emiratis but it’s very slow as Putin is trying to block any returns. He clearly understands every child abducted is a witness to war crimes.”
>
> That is not all. The indoctrination is working. “It’s two and a half years now where they are at Russian schools and taught every day Russia is a great country and Ukraine is bad. The longer we leave them the more assimilated they are and the harder it is to get them back. Some contact us through our hotline saying they want to come home. But we have more and more Ukrainian children who when we track down say ‘we want to stay in Russia because Ukraine is at war and we received Russian citizenship and don’t want to come back’.”
>
> Vova and Sasha, now 16 and 13, say they cried with happiness about their return. Sitting on a bed under a blue and yellow Ukrainian flag, in their Uncle Roman’s house where they now live in the peaceful village of Dobre, near Mykolaiv, they recounted their ordeal.
>
> In mid-July 2022, Russian soldiers came to the basement of the boarding school, counted them all and forced the children onto military vehicles, along with the school’s director, Natalia Lutsyk. They drove them to Kherson, the biggest Ukrainian city to come under occupation.
>
> “They filmed us and made a video saying they were evacuating us to safety,” said Vova. In fact they were taking them against their will and close to the front line.
>
> The terrified orphans, 11 boys and four girls aged between seven and 16, were placed in a centre for child social and psychological rehabilitation in the village of Stepanivka, just outside Kherson – a city that Ukraine has since liberated.
>
> That facility was empty because its director, Volodomyr Sahaidak, had hidden the children with friends and colleagues, fearful the Russians would take them. “We saw Russian propagandists saying that they needed to take children to send to military schools, indoctrinate them and let them fight for Russia,” he told The Sunday Times last year. “I knew they had taken children in 2014 after annexing Crimea and the Donbas and understood the same thing would happen.”
> Advertisement
>
> He was right. On September 30, 2022, Putin triumphantly declared that Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were now part of the Russian federation along with the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic, which Russia had occupied since 2014.
>
> The first thing the occupiers did was open schools. Another recently rescued boy, Zhenya, 15, told how at his school in Kherson they had to sing the anthem every day, were forbidden to use the word war and on Russian Defenders Day, were told to make socks for Russian soldiers and write them postcards. One day military recruitment officers came to the school and issued them military cards. “They told us we will get free houses, a salary up to a million roubles, and that when it got warmer they would return and take us children to the fields to dig trenches.”
>
> Vova and Sasha did not go to school because they had teachers with them. They had been in the centre four months when on October 19, a bus pulled up. “It was all very sudden. We were just going to have lunch when we were told by the headmistress you have 30 minutes to pack as we are going to cross the Dnipro river on vacation for two weeks,” said Vova. “I didn’t believe her.”
>
> He was right. They never came back. “Only after we left were we told we were going to Russia,” he said.
>
> It was a two-day journey, by boat across the Dnipro, then road to Crimea, then train. They ended up at a sanatorium in Anapa, a resort on the northern shore of the Black Sea known as the Pearl of Russia.
> Advertisement
>
> There they found around 200 other children from Kherson. There were classes in patriotism. They had no real lessons, said Vova, just basic things, chanting times tables and checking handwriting. Any mentions of Ukraine were negative. “They wanted us to become Russians,” said Sasha.
>
> Vova feared he would be sent to military school to fight. Some children were taken to Moscow to impress them with the city’s grandeur and size and told they could go to great universities. Vova refused to go.
>
> They were among the lucky ones who got out. Before the Russian invasion, an American family had done the paperwork for the adoption of one of their group of 15. Somehow they tracked the group down and eventually extracted them all to Georgia.
>
> From the start, the brothers’ Uncle Roman had been trying to find them. They had lost touch when the power went off shortly after the invasion. But scouring groups on Facebook and other social media about the missing, he saw a photograph when they were transferred to Kherson.
>
> Eventually he made contact with Save Ukraine who got them and three others back from Georgia — the others have no guardians. “I am so happy to have them back,” he said outside the tumbledown house where he survives through odd jobs such as gardening as well as growing potatoes. Like much of the region the power was off after attacks on energy infrastructure and the house sweltering in 38C.
> Advertisement
>
> But it is not easy. Even though they had some time in Georgia to recover, he says they have nightmares. So traumatised were they by their experience that the whoosh from opening a bottle of fizzy water makes Sasha jump.
>
> The lasting effects of this were all too evident at a special camp near Lutsk in northwest Ukraine for children who have been rescued from forced abduction or occupation.
>
> Fifty children aged seven to 17, most of whom have spent between one and two years under Russian control, were brought together in mid-July for 11 days of sport, activities, Harry Potter movies and intensive psychotherapy.
>
> From a distance they looked like any children as they queued for candy floss then jumped to catch blue and yellow streamers cascading from a blower. But most were pale and thin faced, a result, say therapists, of extended periods of deprivation and lack of sleep from shelling.
>
> Those running the camp say the previous eight camps they worked at were for children processing grief after losing one or both parents, often as they watched.
>
> “This is our hardest camp yet,” said Oksana Lebedeva, who set up Gen Ukrainian, which runs the camps. “These kids have something in their eyes which is different, they look at you as if they are adults with very old eyes.
>
> “Under occupation and in deportation they were constantly checked and punished,” she added. “They agree to everything — it’s submission on the verge of despair. Here we have strict rules and timetable, no phones, go to group therapy, and they do it all without protesting even the teenagers.”
>
> “Children who return from Russian occupation are like mini-soldiers,” said Vannui Martyrosian, 33, the lead psychologist sitting with her black labrador Lola, who she jokes is the main therapist. But even on Lola, war has taken its toll. She has turned grey and developed epilepsy because of the stress of shelling and air raid sirens.
>
> “They are all very well behaved in a negative way, fearful of being even a minute late. It’s painful to see.”
>
> Unlike previous camps, she said, “This time it took us much longer to develop contact with these children as adults are a source of danger for them.”
Misleading headline.
Putin did *not* steal these Ukrainian kids.
It was **ordinary** Russians-cum-mobiks who first kidnapped these kids, and **ordinary** Russians on the home front who then got to work by “adopting” these kids and running “summer camps” and “schools” to turn them into Russians.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is textbook Russification with the open and willing participation of ordinary Russians.
No excuses.
Its sad how news fatigue has numbed Europeans to the sheer scope of the catastrophe of Russia’s bloody imperialist war. We have huge numbers of deaths, abduction and indoctrination of children (genocide), bombing of civilian infrastructure and housing, and we are not even providing the best we can do of *defensive* equipment and weapons, not to speak of what is needed to take back territory. For all the tragedy in Gaza, which of course also needs addressing, I feel Europe is really dropping the ball on the biggest armed conflict on our soil since WW2. Putin’s biggest win so far is making us *accept* that we now have war on our continent.
I’m tired of being sick of my own country
Were they told to fucking cry for this photo?