Russia and Ukraine’s second round of talks in Istanbul, Turkey, quickly stalled, failing to secure a roadmap to peace. One point of contention: the issue of stolen children.
Ukraine says Russia acknowledged that it had taken hundreds of kids. However, Russia rejects the characterization of the children being forcibly removed.
Media outlets have reported on how Ukraine’s kids have become an obscured casualty of war, taken from their homes and forced to forge new lives in a foreign land.
Ksenia Koldin says that’s what happened to her and her younger brother. “We were taken to Russia,” Koldin told CBN News. “Whether we wanted to go or not, we were just sent there against our will.”
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Ksenia’s nightmare began when Russia destroyed her border town of Vovchansk in northeastern Ukraine.
She and her brother, Serhii, were raised together in foster care, but war drove them apart. Russian troops sent Ksenia to a technical school and Serhii to what was described as a “summer camp” before he was ultimately placed with a Russian foster family.
Ksenia wound up getting kicked out for failing to adopt what she calls “Russian propaganda.” Afterward, she started plotting a daring escape to Ukraine but ran into trouble trying to convince her brother.
“He told me, ‘I do not want to return back. I want to stay in Russia,'” she recounted through an interpreter, explaining how Serhii felt unwanted in Ukraine. He also expressed concerns about the country being overrun by Nazis.
Ukrainian child advocates say that narrative is part of the Russian playbook.
“After being brainwashed, they don’t want to communicate,” said Mykola Kuleba, one of Ukraine’s leading child advocates. “They (are) really afraid because, through Russian propaganda, they believe that Nazis will kill them if they come back.”
Kuleba runs a rescue operation for kids called Save Ukraine. He argues that it’s Russia’s goal is to erase kids’ identities and replace them with Russian ideology and fear.
“It’s (the) main intention, main strategy, of Russia to brainwash our children and to recruit them to (the) Russian army,” he told CBN News.
According to Ukraine’s official count, 20,000 children have been forcibly deported since the war started in February 2022. However, that figure does not include kids taken since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
Kuleba contends that many of the kids who were taken end up fighting against their homeland.
“Thousands of young adults who have been Ukrainian schoolchildren ten years ago, now killed on battlefields or sitting in Ukrainian prisons as captured soldiers,” he said.
That’s an alleged war crime, which prompted the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights.
Kuleba believes Putin is guilty of far worse.
“I’m sure in 10, 20 years, (the) whole world will prove and will wake up that, ‘Oh, it was genocide,'” he said.
So far, Save Ukraine has returned more than 600 children in dangerous rescue missions across Russia and the occupied territory. His team also provides counseling and reintegration services for kids and families displaced by war.
Kuleba credits his call as a child advocate to American missionaries who introduced him to the gospel after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“I asked God every day, ‘God, what can I do? How can I serve you?'” he recalled. “It was so clear from Jesus that I’m sending you to save these kids to change their lives.”
That calling brought Ksenia to Kuleba’s team for help and eventually brought her brother to freedom back home in Ukraine.
“He’s very happy, and I’m happy, too, because we (are) together in Ukraine at home,” she explained.
She’s now sharing their journey to raise awareness, even traveling to the United States. It’s a story she’s bravely telling so that other stolen kids will not be forgotten.
