After years of ‘summer camp’ in Russia, children embrace their parents again: ‘They wanted to adopt us’ | Abroad

The children have been brainwashed and also mentally abused in the past year, according to their stories. For example, they were told that their parents no longer wanted to see them and they were moved to other camps again and again. They were literally trapped there.

They had no idea beforehand what would happen to them. For example, 13-year-old Dasha Rakk wanted to leave the occupied city of Kherson with her twin sister and thought of going to a holiday camp in annexed Crimea. Once there, there was no turning back. “They said we would be adopted, that we would have guardians,” says Dasha on Saturday after the emotional return to her motherland. “When they first told us that we had to stay longer, we all started crying.”

Dasha and her sister’s mother drove through four countries to finally see her daughters again after a year with the help of a humanitarian organization. She had to go through Poland, Belarus and Russia to the camp in Crimea. There she saw the conditions in which the children lived. “It was heartbreaking to see the children behind the fence crying.”

Nearly 19,500 children are similarly detained in Russia or occupied territories, according to Ukraine. The international community sees it as abduction or deportation of children and is prosecuting Russia for it. President Putin is personally being sued for it at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, just like the Russian Ombudsman for Children, Maria Aleksyivna Lvova-Belova. Russia says the children were removed for their own safety.

It is the fifth time that children have been returned to their mother country thanks to the organization Save Ukraine. That is a complex operation, says founder Mikola Koeleba. He has seen how the children have been treated in recent times, and no one in Russia made an effort to find their parents. “There are children who changed locations five times in five months, some say they lived with rats and cockroaches.”

Reuters news agency has asked Russia for a response, but has not yet received one. Earlier this week, Lvova-Belova said no one moved the children against their parents’ wishes, unless their parents were unknown. Permission was always asked, she says.

Little is believed of this internationally, after all an arrest warrant has also been issued against Lvova-Bleova. Meanwhile, Save Ukraine’s lawyer collects evidence of human rights violations. “Each story is a whole series of international violations and that cannot go unpunished.”