17 children have returned to Ukraine, whom the occupation authorities of Kharkiv sent back in October last year “on vacation” to children’s camps on the territory of the annexed Crimea. They promised that the children would go there for ten days, but in the end they spent six months there. The Insider correspondent Tatyana Popova spoke with returned children and their parents in Kyiv. According to 16-year-old Vitaly, in the Mechta camp in Evpatoria, children who fought for Ukraine were beaten with an iron stick:
“He beat Astakhov with an iron stick, who is responsible for security. He called himself king there. He said: “You are from Ukraine, who needs you? We will take you to the boarding school, you will sit there and understand everything. One girl was hit on the back and there was such a bruise right there.
We were sitting in the hall then and someone shouted: “Glory to Ukraine!”, And someone answered: “Glory to the heroes!”. They were taken away, but I don't know what happened to them. He also burned the flag of Ukraine, this one is in charge of security. They found a small Ukrainian flag on a stick from the girl. She said that her mother and father brought her from Kyiv. She put it in a glass and then hung it on the curtains. This one comes in, rips it off and yells obscenities: “You crests are sick! You are in Russia, there will never be Ukraine anywhere, it will simply burn down. Let's go, you will watch how Ukraine is burning. I set the flag on fire with a lighter, and it burned down.
A person with the surname Astakhov from Evpatoria is in the Peacemaker database , but The Insider could not get through to him.
Vitaly said that he and his girlfriend ran away from the camp for two days:
“We then said: “Glory to Ukraine!” and ran away for two days. We came to a hotel in Evpatoria, the girl's mother threw off 600 rubles, and rented a single room, slept on the floor. We bought food and ate. There in the center was the Eternal Flame and the Russian flag hangs. My friend came up and put it out with her foot. And there was a grandmother, who is also for Ukraine, and she says: “I have been waiting for Ukraine for eight years.”
Then they were found by the police and returned to the camp. There, children began to be intimidated that they would never return to Ukraine, but instead they would be given to foster families, because their parents allegedly abandoned them:
“We had conversations in the spirit: “Are you sick? Ukraine will burn! You will definitely not return home, and if you return, then only with problems! They said that they would take us to a boarding school in Pskov. We told them: “The parents didn’t refuse us, you won’t take us anywhere,” to which they: “They refused you.” My mother called the camp director and said: “What are you talking about? I did not say that! Why are you lying to children? They answered her: “You won’t take them anyway. These will be the children of Russia.”
Vitaly says that all the children from the Mechta camp were transferred to the Druzhba camp, and the conditions there were even worse: there was no bed linen, only a dirty mattress and pillow, and for disobedience they were locked in the basement for several hours:
“We were forced to sing the Russian anthem, hold the Russian flag, raise it to the flagpole, but we didn’t do it. They threw off the text of the anthem and said: “Teach, tomorrow you will tell”, but then they somehow forgot about it. They kept it in the basement. They said: “You are for Ukraine, and you are not needed!”. The girl was kept alone for four hours. Everyone is different. They forced us to clean the corridors, because the cleaners did not clean. There was no bed linen, only a pillow and a mattress some kind of dirty. It's not in basements, it's in rooms. We ourselves bought a light bulb and screwed it in so that at least there was light. There were no sockets in the room either. I told them [about bad conditions], and they told me: “You are from Ukraine, sleep on whatever you want.”
At first, the children were not allowed to go home, explaining this for security reasons, and then they were told that they simply would not return. When it was nevertheless possible to agree on the return of the children, Russia demanded that the parents pick them up personally. “They were told: “If you want, come yourself and take your children if you need them. But it turned out that when these areas were de-occupied, there was a front line between mothers and these children: they could not come,” she said . an interview with Current Time last December by Save Ukraine coordinator Miroslava Kharchenko.
“The legend was that they went to the camp for two weeks. First they went for two weeks, then the child called me and said that they were extending it. On November 4, they were supposed to return, but the Crimean bridge was bombed. the mother of one of the girls told The Insider. – In November, our people came to Kherson and we asked them how to pick up the child. We were forced to leave Kherson with volunteers from the Khmelnitsky region, and there, through the police, the inspector for children gave us the phone number of volunteer Katya. We went through the Russian Federation. On Sunday I went to Kyiv, and on Monday evening we already left for Poland, then to Belarus, Russia and Crimea, and then back.”
“We waited 6.5 months from the moment of departure. We turned to Save Ukraine, submitted an application, the wife called and said that we had to wait, because there were a lot of children, but the moment was slowly being decided. A volunteer called a week ago and said that there is a person who can pick it up. They wrote a power of attorney for a woman who was going to Evpatoria for her child. Came, picked up and delivered within two days. Yesterday we arrived from Kherson, we were met, settled in a hotel, and in the morning we came to pick up the children. All this time we lived in Kherson,” says the father of another child.
Not all children have experienced abuse in the camps, but all speak of poor conditions and substandard food.
“I first went to the first Druzhba camp. The conditions there were very bad – six sockets per floor, and 50 people live on the floor. Two bathrooms and toilets for boys and two for girls,” said Vlad from Kherson. – Cleaned there quite rarely. The food is worse than average, so-so.”
According to Vlad, there were lessons in the Russian program in the camp. They were forced to listen to the anthem of the Russian Federation while exercising while standing. Then they were moved to the Luchisty camp. “Everything was much better there – excellent rooms, bathrooms, a toilet in each room, at least five sockets, feeding is much better. There were some clubs, football, volleyball and so on,” the boy says.
A Yale University lab study said that there are now more than 40 camps for Ukrainian children in Siberia, on the Black Sea coast, in the central regions, in the Urals and in the annexed Crimea. According to the authors of the report, in the camps children are taught about "traditional values", they are taught history according to "Russian standards", they are taught how to shoot and use equipment. Some camps, including those in Crimea and Chechnya, were alleged to be running a "young fighter course " .
At the end of December, it became known that the administrations of children's camps in Crimea were not letting Kherson children go home. It was reported that more than 100 children did not return to Balakleya from another camp.
The website of the state portal "Children of War" reports the disappearance of 16,226 children. Return to their homeland, according to the site, so far managed 308.
On March 17, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and children's ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova, saying they were responsible for the forced removal of children.