The children who have to become Russians

‘Vita is a vulnerable, sensitive, impressionable girl. She responds shyly to both praise and criticism and tries not to show her feelings. This means she is somewhat reserved when communicating with children her own age or grown-ups.’

This is how Vita from Ukraine is put up for adoption. She features on a Russian-language website where Russian families can choose a new family member.

This website lists almost 300 Ukrainian children from orphanages and medical institutions in Luhansk, Eastern Ukraine.

Who are these children? How did they end up on this website? This is their story.

‘Max is quiet and avoids conflict. He immediately does what he is told to do and actively takes part in school activities. He works hard, is meticulous and ambitious. His dream is to become a soldier.’

‘Anna is a nice, polite girl who easily makes contact with children her own age. During games she often assumes a leading role. She always helps other children with putting on clothes and shoes.’

Vita, Max and Anna are Ukrainian children from orphanages and medical institutions in Luhansk, eastern Ukraine. They are put up for adoption on a Russian-language website where Russian families can choose a new family member. In the ‘People’s Republic of Luhansk’– Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia since 2014 – the self-appointed ‘government’ has launched several of such sites with photographs and descriptions of Ukrainian children. The largest site contains 290 advertisements.

In these photographs the children pose in front of a mural depicting a luscious brown tree, in the orphanage where they live. Or in front of a Christmas tree decorated in the white, red and blue of the Russian flag. Or on green wooden playground equipment, or in a gym painted bright blue, with balloons and a basket in the background.

Because of the system behind these websites a warrant has been issued in The Hague for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian children’s ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court considers moving children to Russia a war crime. According to the Genocide Convention of 1948, the forced transfer of children to a different population can in some forms be seen as genocide. It is a violation of a people, is the reasoning behind this, as its purpose is to cut off a people’s future – through the children – by deporting a generation.

What’s remarkable is that this alleged war crime is being committed quite openly. No one in Russia denies that children from occupied Ukrainian territory are brought to the Russian Federation to live with adoptive families. Under the guise of ‘humanitarian considerations’ the Russian state even encourages its citizens to adopt Ukrainian children in their homes. ‘These children need our help,’ is children’s ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova’s comment. She has herself adopted a 15-year-old boy from Mariupol.

How many children are involved is hard to say. The University of Yale looked at public sources in Russia and Ukraine and concluded that at least 6000 children have been illegally brought to Russia. The researchers believe that the real number is much higher.

Western media tend to focus on the most brutal forms of child abduction. Various incidents have been reported of children who were taken while walking around unsupervised. Also, in newly occupied territory the Russians separate Ukrainians from their children when screening the parents for connections with the army.

De Volkskrant has looked into who these children are and what methods Russia uses to ‘russify’ them. In the course of this investigation, we found a number of adoption websites from the Donbas region, the largest of which is the aforementioned site from Luhansk.

The children presented here are between a few months and 18 years of age. More than half of them have, to a greater or lesser degree, physical or mental disabilities, according to the website. Applying face recognition software on their photos reveals that dozens of teenagers are active on social media where they share details of their lives. In addition, they figure in propaganda items on Russian news sites. Some could even be traced to Russia. Salient detail: a number of these children are staying in the orphanage that main suspect and children’s ombudswoman Lvova-Belova visited in person.

The picture painted by the sources is one of many shades of grey. de Volkskrant found children who are actually orphans, come from broken homes, or have no one to look after them for other reasons. Some of these children may even be considered to be better off in Russian adoptive families. And that is how Russia pitches this.

However, the fact is that much of the misery in which these children find themselves has been caused by Russia itself. Some orphans would in all likelihood still have their parents if Russia had not started this war in 2014. Others could have received regular medical care in Ukraine itself if their hometown had not been occupied or the nearest hospital had not been bombed by Russia.

This is the story of an often-forgotten group of war victims, based on the 290 children on the adoption website from Luhansk.

Some children really are orphans

Alina (16)
‘Alina has a quiet disposition. She responds well to instructions given by grown-ups. She likes to sing and she takes good care of her personal belongings. Alina would love to find a new family in which she feels loved.’

The picture with this adoption advertisement shows a 16-year-old girl with a ponytail. She stands in front of a Christmas tree wearing a white Christmassy blouse, smiling cautiously.

Nine years earlier, Alina’s picture was also taken, face recognition software reveals. In December 2014, a Russian news site published an article about a pro-Russian militia that offered help to a ‘very poor’ orphanage in Perevalsk, in the Luhansk region. Among the photographs of children posing with the militia members and their automatic rifles is also one of little Alina , sitting on the knee of a separatist soldier.

Although the war in eastern Ukraine was then raging for less than a year, the Alina in this photograph had already lost both her parents because of the violence. ‘Her parents are murdered,’ the Russian journalists write. Her mother ‘died at home’ and her father ‘was a militia member’.

Alina represents a larger group of orphans who really have no parents, were born with the Ukrainian nationality and are now living in Russian-occupied territory. If one is to believe the Russian media, most Ukrainian children they ‘save’ are children like Alina. The articles about the orphanages contain a lot of heart-breaking phrases to describe these poor children from the Donbas: ‘What a joy it is to know that we have helped these children’ to ‘forget the worries and hardships of their tiny lives’.

To a Russian family this all sounds quite plausible: orphans are wardens of the state and because the border line has shifted, that state is no longer Ukraine. According to Russian law the state therefore has the obligation to take care of these children and find families for them.

It is hard to really ascertain how many of the 290 children featured on the adoption website we investigated are really parentless, but it seems likely that there are indeed orphans among them, as Russia claims. This assumption is confirmed by the fact that de Volkskrant was able to establish that a number of children had already been living in institutions in the people’s republics for many years. Also, their profiles hardly mention any adults – apart from a number of women from the orphanage staff.

They come and collect the orphans It may seem well-intended, but transferring and ‘distributing’ orphans such as Alina is part of the Russian strategy for the russification of as many Ukrainian children as possible.

The process has been analysed by many international researchers and best of all by Human Rights East, a Ukrainian human rights organisation that described step-by-step what Russia does when it occupies a part of Ukraine. After the children are taken from an institution (step 1) they are brought to a ‘temporary detention centre’ in occupied territory (step 2); they are then transferred to the Russian border region (step 3) and finally to special distribution points in Russia (step 4) where the adoption procedure starts (step 5). To make that last step proceed smoothly, adoptive parents can turn to regional databanks, such as the one from Luhansk.

Russia has set up a framework of laws, decrees, and organisations for the Russification of children. For instance, in May of last year, at the request of children’s ombudswoman Lvova-Belova President Vladimir Putin signed a decree that makes it easier for Russia to grant Ukrainian children Russian citizenship.

Dozens of children of the 290 from Luhansk were transferred several times. Sometimes temporarily to Russia, sometimes to another institution and in between they were sent to summer camps for a while. This circulation of children – often in small groups – is intended to detach the Ukrainian children from their environment and prepare them for a future in Russia.

II. A donation for Viktoria

Viktoria (9)‘This little girl has health issues. Therefore, she needs a lot of care.’

In the photograph on the adoption site 9-year-old Viktoria lies in a ball pit, two red poppy bows in her hair, staring into the lens with her grey-blue eyes. The organisation is looking for a guardian for the girl, who suffers from cerebral palsy.

Viktoria has since been moved to Moscow, de Volkskrant found out. She lives in a centre of the charity organisation ‘The Path of Life’, which has placed a call on his website to donate money for a sit-in as well as for a spine operation. Viktoria’s arms and legs are contorted. The institute where she is now writes how Viktoria’s mother has never even spent a single day with her daughter. She was sent to a boarding school where ‘no one ever came to visit her and no one looked after her’.

Viktoria is by far not the only Luhansk child with medical problems. Of the 290 children on the adoption site 173 have ‘health characteristics’, according to the Russians. These vary from heart conditions to intellectual disability. Some children are ‘special and need much care and attention’, others ‘have difficulties adopting to new surroundings’ or ‘sometimes behave aggressively’, the adoption organisation writes.

Russian media often repeat that the children from Luhansk need medical care and that it is therefore important for Russia to help, with money, evacuation, or by adopting children. The Russian propaganda station Russia Today even made a documentary about Russian doctors who went to help handicapped children in Luhansk. Viktoria also appears in this documentary, as does another girl who is listed on the adoption site.

However, the charity organisation ‘The Path of Life’ paints a rather more dramatic family story than is actually the case. The photograph of Viktoria on the adoption website – the one taken in the ball pit – is from a page on the popular Russian social medium VKontakte of a woman who has posted quite a lot of photos of Viktoria over the years. She is probably her mother (or caretaker). ‘My angel,’ she writes next to a photo of Viktoria dressed completely in rock-candy pink.

In another photo from 2018, Viktoria, wearing a little white lace dress, sits in this woman’s lap, apparently celebrating her birthday with her grandma, who is also often in photographs with the girl. In brief, it is not true that no one was looking after Viktoria.

‘Medical evacuation’ Just like the transferring and ‘distribution’ of orphans, medical evacuation is also often a mere guise. According to researchers from Yale large groups of Ukrainian children are systematically transferred to Russia because of a ‘medical emergency’, whereas it is doubtful whether the children all really need medical attention.

This policy too was invented in Moscow. In September, President Putin decided that all children in occupied Ukrainian territory had to undergo a mandatory medical examination and allocated 1.4 billion rouble (more than 15 million euros) for examining tens of thousands of children.

In the report from Yale the American investigators give the example of a girl from occupied territory who was sent to a summer camp by her mother. There she had a panic attack and was subsequently taken to a hospital. After that, the mother never heard from her again.

Children from dysfunctional families ‘Sveta was living with her mother in a hostel in Pervomaisk. The mother ‘drinks’, let’s put it this way. I can’t say that she is a terrible person. She just is who she is.’

Sveta – a girl ‘like a ray of sunshine’ – pops up in a blog by the Russian blogger Yevdokia Sheremetyeva who has been travelling to Donetsk for many years to bring relief goods. Sveta herself is not listed on the Luhansk adoption website; other children with her in the photograph are.

Blogger Sheremetyeva tells how in 2014 she found Sveta in the orphanage in the Luhansk region and was moved by her story. The girl had been living with her mother in a hostel. One night there was a lot of drinking and a fight broke out between two men. One of them, presumably an ex of the mother, threw a grenade. Sveta’s mother was heavily injured and the girl was brought to an orphanage.

Sveta is not the only child from a dysfunctional family now in an orphanage in occupied territory. In Ukraine – as in Russia – it is customary to remove children from problematic families from their homes and deprive the parents of guardianship either temporarily or permanently. Russian propaganda often repeats how Russia tries to help children from dysfunctional families.

This is not mere propaganda. Dozens of the 290 children who are now listed for adoption appear to indeed come from broken homes. Their parents are violent, addicted, have died from an overdose, or are in prison. The descriptions of the children on the adoption site hint at the personal dramas and neglect: ‘His little brother still lives with the mother’, for example. And ‘Zenya has never known any maternal care or affection or fatherly support in her entire life’.

Manipulation It is quite possible that some children indeed suffered from neglect. But still, this claim is questionable as well.

Parents and family members in occupied territory are after all also pressured to give up children such as Sveta, various studies show. ‘This often concerns families from the fringes of society,’ says Tamila Bezpala, a human rights lawyer from Kharkiv. Low-skilled people with few resources who sometimes went along with the evacuation of the children during the occupation. Some parents are, or were pro-Russian. ‘There have also been cases of parents, addicts for instance, who were paid if they cooperated with deportation.’ Others cooperated because they lived in heavily bombarded areas and wanted to protect their children.

In many cases people were threatened by soldiers or collaborators and were told that their children would be returned to them. That false promise was also made in a different way: Yale describes how parents believed that they gave permission in writing for a summer camp whereas in reality they gave up guardianship. Several Ukrainian researchers suspect that there was large-scale tampering with legal documents in occupied territory.

When it is unclear who has guardianship or when the parents are missing, children are quickly removed. If there is only the slightest blemish on the reputation of parents or grandparents, they are quickly deprived of guardianship. It is all aimed at transferring as many children is possible to Russia, say researchers of Human Rights East, among others.

III. Loving Russia

Alex (16) ‘Alex’s physical development corresponds with his age. He is active in the children’s team and makes friends easily.’

Then 15-year-old Alex – light eyes, bushy eyebrows – looks at the camera in march 2022 somewhat tensely as he begins to recite. He smiles a little mischievously. After a few sentences his voice becomes steady as he recites the Soviet poem with much pathos and rolling R’s. He ends on a solemn note:

They fought to their last breath
Saved their last bullet
Their names are carried by the wind
The sad wind of that war

The boy is in Rostov, Russia. The Ukrainian lad was moved here shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, together with a group of other orphans, as shown in a video report by a local news site. It shows how Ukrainian children are given a Christmas present by the Russian government, followed by military training, teaching the boys how to take away a knife from an attacker and how to jump through car tyres.

Alex grew up in an environment where ‘Russia’ has been a household word for the last nine years. Many children like Alex openly state that they are looking forward to a future in Russia. On social media they diligently share pictures of Russian flags, selfies with a portrait of Putin, and rallying slogans about Mother Russia. One boy writes that he ‘can hardly wait’ to receive his Russian passport.

Also, Alex has been subjected for many years to ‘patriotic re-education’, as Russia calls it. The lessons taught in one of the Luhansk orphanages where several of the children stayed provides insight into how this works in practice. The lessons include: ‘international mother tongue day’, ‘Donbas is my fatherland’, ‘Russia is my motherland’, ‘How Voroshilovgrad (Luhansk’s Soviet name – ed.) was liberated from Nazi invaders’.

The photographs show children in line listening to Soviet songs or knitting caps for Russian soldiers. It is also apparent that the children are in frequent contact with the military and with volunteers from Yunarmia, a military-patriotic youth organisation that trains children and tries to instil in them enthusiasm for the Russian army.

In addition, there are indications that sometimes violence is used against children who refuse to bend. Although, at a press conference in April, Lvova-Belova stressed that the children are not being Russified and are allowed to speak Ukrainian, children who managed to return to Ukraine have told Western media otherwise.

Two girls who managed to escape from a summer camp have testified that other children who expressed a pro-Ukrainian attitude were dragged into a pit and were beaten there. The Yale report mentions how a little boy would not be allowed to go home because of his ‘pro-Ukrainian’ ideas. Another boy who managed to return told Ukrainian media about children who were beaten with metal sticks.

Back to Ukraine?
Almost all of the 290 children on the adoption website are not in Russia yet, but they may be adopted any moment. The big question is whether these children, once they have been housed in Russian families, will ever be able to return to Ukraine. Since all diplomatic ties between Russia and Ukraine were severed at the start of the invasion, negotiations about their fate are nigh impossible.

One thing is certain: the way back is strewn with obstacles and not one that an underage child can travel alone. Some of the children get help. In Georgia de Volkskrant spoke with an activist who managed to bring a group of Ukrainian children across the border after mediation by a Georgian government official. The activist did not want to provide any more details, so as not to reveal the difficult escape route.

Officially, Russia says that parents can come and collect their offspring and some parents do so. But the journey is expensive and not without danger. Men are not allowed to leave the Ukraine because of the general mobilisation and many women are afraid to enter hostile territory, knowing that they will be interrogated by the Russian secret service FSB for hours on end before they can take their children home with them.

And then there are children who will not be collected. Their parents may have problems or be (partly) pro-Russian, for example, or the children need too much expensive care. The fact that some parents cooperated with the deportation is a source of much anxiety, shame, and despondency. Some people are in such dire circumstances that this prevents them from collecting their children. These are vulnerable people who may suffer from severe war traumas, says human rights lawyer Tamila Bezpala. ‘Also, they are afraid of the stigma; to be seen as collaborators.’

The same goes for the children, says journalist Julia Himera, who made a documentary about two girls she helped escape when no one else did. ‘Children who come back feel terribly ashamed.’

Time is running out, says human rights lawyer Vira Yаstrebuva of Human Rights East. Passports are already being issued. ‘In this process personal data are changed, which frustrates the procedure for finding and identifying Ukrainian children.’ In addition, it is hard to enter Ukraine with a Russian passport at the moment. ‘So even when a child wants to return, it is very difficult for him or her to prove that they are actually Ukrainians.’

According to Yаstrebuva, the Ukraine government should do a whole lot more to help the children. ‘Their return should not depend on how much effort a family member, human rights organisation or journalist makes for them. A central office should collect all the information, identify the children, and facilitate their return.’

A war crime Among the 290 smiling children on the adoption site there are some that perhaps are better off in Russia than in the grim mining region of Luhansk. Children without parents, children who wanted it themselves, or children who can receive better medical care in Russia. But even if there are individual cases of children who would benefit from deportation, the unauthorised transfer of children from one country to another is always a violation of the laws of war.

It is forbidden to transfer people, let alone children, from occupied territory, says Dutch human rights lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld. ‘Changing the composition of the population of an area by means of deportation is a war crime. And that is what is happening here.’

Besides, children have a special protected status, says Zegveld, in both international law of war and in UN treaties. The only exception are orphans that are temporarily evacuated in order to protect them. ‘But in that case, they must be brought to a state that is neutral in the war. Not to the territory of the occupying country.’

Even based on the lowest number of children supposedly being deported by Russia to its own territory, we are dealing with a crime that affects a huge number of people, says Iva Vukusic, who studies war crimes at the Dutch University of Utrecht. ‘All of these children have family members. We are talking about tens of thousands of people who are affected by this.’

‘It is unbelievable how much effort Moscow puts into this operation,’ says Ukrainian human rights lawyer Tamila Bezpala. ‘At first, I couldn’t even believe that this was as big as my colleagues claimed. Meanwhile, I have seen with my own eyes the scale on which this takes place, how well it is organised, how much money Russia spends on it, and how many people are involved. It is an industry.’¶The Kharkiv lawyer shakes her head. ‘I still find it dazzling. And the tragic thing is that it concerns a group of children for whom nobody really wanted to lift a finger before this war.’

With the help of Yulia Yatsenko, Erik Verwiel and Xander van Uffelen. Translation: Leo Reijnen

About the story:
de Volkskrant gathered information from public sources and social media about all 290 children who were listed on the adoption website from Luhansk by late April 2023. We used face recognition software and a database with more than 1.1 billion photographs from VKontakte, a popular Russian alternative for Facebook. Via profiles on VKontakte we were able to contact family members and sometimes even the children themselves. We were also able to trace how the children are deployed in Russian news media as well as the present whereabouts of some of them.
The use of face recognition software is controversial. According to European laws, creating databases is subject to restrictions in order to safeguard privacy. The people whose photographs are in such a database have after all never given their consent. de Volkskrant has used these digital techniques because they enabled us to arrive at a better picture of the methods applied by Russia to transfer Ukrainian children to Russia.

In order to gain insight into the lives of the children we also studied their own social media. However, as we are dealing with very vulnerable, underaged children, we have only used this information anonymously in this article and made up some fictional names. The real names are known to the editors.

In the meantime, more advertisements of children have appeared on the adoption website from Luhansk. The counter is currently at 293. 29 children are no longer on the website, meaning 32 new children have been added since the start of our investigation.

Design: Titus Knegtel Code: Adriaan van der Ploeg, Martijn Eerens