Oleksandr has not seen his mother since Russian soldiers captured the pair in Mariupol, in southern Ukraine, in April and took her away. At 12, he escaped adoption into a Russian family only because he remembered his grandmother’s phone number and called her to come and save him.
Russia’s proxy social welfare officials in occupied Ukraine discouraged her, warning of heavy fighting.
“They said that they would send him to an orphanage or they would find a family in Russia,” said his grandmother, Lyudmila, of Ichnya, in Ukraine’s northern Chernihiv region. “I told them, ‘I’ll risk my life. I’ll come and pick him up.’ I was pleading with them not to send him to Russia.
“They told me, ‘It’s going to be very hard, and the paperwork is awful.’ I said I didn’t care,” Lyudmila said. The Washington Post is identifying her and Oleksandr by first names only to protect them from reprisal.
While Ukrainians face daunting logistical barriers to recover children taken to Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a decree last May making it quick and easy for Russians to adopt Ukrainian children.
The policy is vigorously pursued by Putin’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, who openly advocates stripping children of their Ukrainian identities and teaching them to love Russia. Last spring, Lvova-Belova personally adopted a Ukrainian boy — an orphan who had been evacuated from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was under heavy bombing by Russia, first to Donetsk and then to a sanitorium near Moscow. Lvova-Belova has also spoken publicly about her efforts to change his views.
It is a potential war crime to remove children during conflict or to change their nationality, but Russia has been secretive about how many Ukrainian children have families or relatives who want them returned home. Lvova-Belova has insisted that none have Ukrainian families, while Ukraine officials say all belong in Ukraine.
“Russia changed its adoption law to give these children to Russian families as soon as possible,” said Alexandra Romantsova of the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, which documents possible Russian war crimes and won the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize. “In these families, children are kept from the truth so they don’t give them the chance to keep a connection with Ukrainians or Ukrainian identity at all. It is one of the ways that Russia is trying to destroy Ukrainian identity.”
Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine’s top children’s rights official said last month that 10,764 Ukrainian children had been reported by relatives, family or friends to have been deported by Russia without their parents.
At a news conference on Oct. 26, Lvova-Belova said that about 2,000 “unaccompanied children” from Ukraine were “evacuated” to Russia, mainly to orphanages and other groups homes, while “350 orphans from Donbas have already been placed in foster families in 16 regions of Russia, but a thousand more children are waiting for new parents.”
Lvova-Belova did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
In August, the Department for Family and Children in Russia’s Krasnodar region posted a statement on its website that more than 1,000 children from Ukraine had been adopted by families in distant cities including Tyumen, Irkutsk, Kemerovo and even the Altai Territory, more than 2,000 miles from Ukraine.
Three hundred more were awaiting adoption, the department said. After an outcry, the page was swiftly deleted, but a copy is archived.
The Kremlin has made a p
