Fate of thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia hangs in the balance of talks

Kyiv, Ukraine – Armed with machine guns, Russian soldiers dressed in hoods burst into the home of Vladislav Rudenko, 16, in the city of Kherson in the south of Ukraine and gave him half an hour to bring things together.

“I was alone at home. I wrapped my things in a panic,” the teenager told NBC News, describing in the morning in October 2022, eight months after the Russian forces captured the city, when he said that the soldiers forced him to get into a car and leave “in an unknown direction.”

It was the beginning of an eight -month nightmare when the teenager was part of a systematic effort of Russia to move and re -educate thousands of children from Ukraine, in some cases adopting them by force while sending others to military training camps.

During a meeting with President Donald Trump and several European leaders at the White House last month, Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine raised the issue of “kidnapped” Ukraine. His comments occurred three days after Trump met his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska for talks at the end of the war.

While little progress has been made to a cease-fire since then, Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine, a leading non-governmental organization supporting people trying to obtain the return of their Russian children, insisted that “the attention of world leaders must remain on children, not only the earth”.

Kuleba, whose organization says it has saved more than 750 children from Russia and the Ukrainian territories occupied by its forces, says that the pressure for their withdrawal and their rehabilitation came from the highest levels in the Kremlin.

The International Criminal Court accused Putin of the war crime of supervising the illegal abduction and the deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia and, in March 2023, it issued an arrest warrant. The ICC also accused Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Putin’s presidential commissioner to children’s rights, of committing similar crimes.

“They force these children to be Russian, to be Russian soldiers”, Kuleba Said in a telephone interview last month, adding: “The Russian regime clearly intends to destroy the Ukrainian identity.”

NBC News contacted the Ministry of Defense of Russia and the LVOVA-Belova office to comment on both Vlad kidnappings and ICC arrest warrants.

Vlad said it was taken to two Crimea camps, the Black Sea Peninsula that Russia seized Ukraine and annexed in 2014, then to a naval academy in the Kherson region occupied by Putin forces.

“They tried to break me in all possible ways,” he said, adding that he was treated “very badly” and denied food in the first camp because he “started to show my pro-Ukrainian position”.

On an occasion, he said, he “killed the Russian flag and suspended my underwear there.” This led him to be thrown into lonely isolation for a week, he said, adding that his captors “fed me twice a day, allowed me to communicate with anyone”.

Another time, he said, the head of security of one of the camps tore a girl’s t-shirt and trampled on it because he wore the coat of arms of Ukraine.

In regular classes with other Ukrainian children whose age varied from 6 to 18 years, he said: “We have learned everything about Russia, the history of Russia, etc.”, adding that they had also talked about recent war events, such as the Ukrainian territories had been captured.

“I understood that Russia is a country of attacker and it took off my childhood and broke my contacts with my family so as not to see them,” he said.

The morning of his capture, said Vlad, he had managed to call his mother, Tatiana, 38, To tell him that he had been kidnapped.

Tatiana said she was not at home when he was taken because she had been taken to the Russian commander’s office to write a statement on her mother, Rudenko Tamara, 53, who died during an attack the day before. They wanted her to say “that Ukraine killed my mother,” she said.

During the call, Tatiana said, Vlad told him that he was in the city of Olezhky and that “was going to be in Crimea to rest”, which left him perplexed. “At that time, we just had a little fight,” she added. “I just said to him,” How could you leave your family at such a difficult period? ” I knew no details.

With other parents, she did not realize until much later that the Russian soldiers had led to children to say that they were evacuated from bombing and sent to summer camps.

With intense fights in Kherson, even after the Russian forces were pushed out of the city in November 2022, Tatiana said that the month after kidnapping, she decided to move west in the city of Mykolaïv.

With her husband, Olexsandr, 43, who is also the Vlad stepfather, she left the city with her five other organic children, including the baby Stefania, who had less than a year at the time. NBC News agreed not to use Oleksandr’s family name because it was called to the Ukrainian army in February 2023 and is still in service. His sister and cousin joined them while they were heading west to the city of Mykolav.

Although Vlad’s phone was systematically checked by her Russian captors, Tatiana said she was able to stay in touch with her son by occasional text messages, but “she told her not to create problems”.

“I said when you can, if you are there alone or if nobody escorts you, then write,” she said, adding that she was able to establish that he was detained in a camp in Lazurne in south-eastern Ukraine.

After a friend told her about saving Ukraine, he said Tatiana, she contacted the organization, which, after several months of planning, organized to go to Russia with six other women whose children had been taken.

Without a direct route on the front lines, said Tatiana, she traveled through Poland, Belarus and the capital of Russia, Moscow, before she could ultimately go to the camp via Crimea.

No one from Save Ukraine accompanied the group, she said, but its representatives were in contact by phone and organized to be set up by a volunteer in a temporary house.

Although she was roughly excavated by masked men on arrival, Tatiana said, things initially seemed to go well. But on the second day, she said, agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB espionage agency, came, put a mask above his head and took him somewhere for interrogation, after “confiscated my documents and my phone”.

“They questioned me, perhaps six or seven o’clock,” she said, adding that she was locked in a basement cell during the night before wondering the next morning. Her interrogators were particularly interested in saving Ukraine, she said.

They also brought a cameraman and a journalist, who, according to her, expected what she says “how great Russia is, how it helps us and how bad Ukraine is for us”.

Although she was initially reluctant, she said, she was able to use Vlad’s phone to consult Save Ukraine by SMS. Tatiana said the group said, “Do what is necessary, just for you to leave there.”

NBC News contacted the FSB to comment.

After giving the interview to the camera, she said, she was released with Vlad and authorized to make the difficult trip to his home.

“It was just happiness after horror. … I was simply surprised,” said Tatiana.

Kidnapped children are now spread over approximately 200 Black Sea locations on the Russian Coast of the Pacific, according to Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale School of Public Health (HRL), the main organization for monitoring Ukrainian children.

The group watched the children’s movement by analyzing satellite photos and photographing planes and vehicles apparently used to transport children, among other techniques.

“They don’t all come from the same place. They don’t all go to the same place. They don’t all have the same goal,” said Raymond in a telephone interview last month.

Sense. Lindsey Graham, Rs.C., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., Launched the possibility of introducing a bill to the Senate which, if it were adopted, could designate Russia and Bélarus as sponsors of the state of terrorism in the middle of the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, a source familiar with the bill told by terrorism in the middle of August. A bill bill indicates that Belarus “directly supported the removal of Ukrainian children and supported their resettlement”.

But both except Ukraine and HRL took a financial hit last spring after the Trump administration reduced funding for their programs.

While Russia pushes to take control of more Ukrainian territory, the rescue of Ukrainian children has become an even more urgent problem, according to experts.

“This is one more reason to get all the children that we can go back before the door closed,” said Raymond.

“This is now the decisive moment when America cannot afford to step back,” added Kuleba, from Save Ukraine.

As for Vlad, who is now 19 years old, he said that his family thought kept him during his stay in captivity, and he rushed to see his little sister Stefania as soon as he returned home.

Now, in the capital of Ukraine, kyiv, he hopes to become a sports coach.

“What helped me all the time was probably that I had family in Ukraine,” he said. “And I could return to Ukraine and build a normal future.

Dyna Mayer reported from Kyiv and New York Babak Dehghanpisheh.