The Save Ukraine team managed to return five deported orphans to the territory of Ukraine.
This was announced by the head of the organization, Mykola Kuleba.
"Today [May 31], Ukraine is rejoicing in a special way: we managed to save five pupils of the Novopetriv boarding school in the Mykolaiv region," he wrote.
The children lived on the front line for three months, hiding from bombs and rockets in the basement without food or water. In mid-July 2022, they were kidnapped by the Russians at gunpoint and moved to the occupied territory.
Initially, the children were kept in the Kherson Center for Social and Psychological Rehabilitation. Russian soldiers came to them every day and checked whether they had escaped. Children were threatened.
In October 2022, the occupiers took the children to Crimea, and then to Anapa, Krasnodar Territory of the Russian Federation. From there, they managed to take the children to Georgia, then they returned to Ukraine.
Deportation of Ukrainian children
In the face of a full-scale invasion, Moscow is mass-deporting Ukrainian children from the occupied territories of Ukraine. They are taken to the occupied Crimea, Russia or Belarus allegedly for "rehabilitation or rest in camps."
On May 13, 2023, Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a briefing in Rome with the Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni stated that it is known with certainty about more than 19,300 children who were deported. Meanwhile, Russia is deliberately changing the legislation to make it impossible for Ukrainian children to return to the Motherland, and for this purpose, in particular, is using the forced change of their citizenship to Russian.
On December 7, 2023, the Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, announced that the deportation of 19,540 Ukrainian children by Russia had been officially confirmed.
As of February 2024, it was known that from the beginning of the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war to October 2023 , 2,442 Ukrainian children were taken to Belarus. In summer camps in Belarus, as the researchers note, ideas that "correspond to the political interests of Russia and Belarus" were promoted.