Last February, at a raucous celebration marking the one-year anniversary of the start of the "Russian military operation" on Ukrainian territory, 15-year-old Ukrainian girl Anya Nomenko grabbed the microphone in front of thousands of revelers and thanked "Uncle Yuri" – a Russian soldier – for saving her, her sister Carolina, who is also standing on the stage, and hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol, a Ukrainian city that has been violently attacked since the first day of the Russian war in February 2022.

During her speech, the girl suddenly got confused, then turned shyly to the adults standing next to her, and said: "I forgot a little", and the girl seemed to repeat a word prepared by someone in advance, then a woman wearing a red coat came forward to cover up that slip, the girl pushed towards the Russian soldier and said: "Anya. Don't be shy, go hug Uncle Yuri." Anya hugged the soldier as the woman pointed towards him and went on to tell a group of young children standing on the stage, "Hug him, he's the man who saved you all," and then a flood of gratitude and love poured in for the soldier.

The clip aired on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" program accompanied by extensive coverage, including an interview Cooper gave Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of Yale University's Humanities Research Laboratory, who expressed annoyance at the clip, which he believes depicts a "hostage." "These children have been forcibly removed from Ukraine, they are being re-educated as part of Moscow's project to 'troy' Ukraine, and Russia's treatment of them violates the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child," Raymond said.

Children of Ukraine in the hands of Russians

The case of Anya Nomenko and her sister is not unique, as Ukraine accuses Russian forces of "kidnapping" Ukrainian children from orphanages and child protection centers, in Ukrainian areas under Russian control, and then deporting them to Moscow for rehabilitation and adoption within Russian society.

OFFICIAL UKRAINIAN DATA PUBLISHED BY THE "UKRAINE" WEBSITE, WHICH IS RUN BY THE "BRAND UKRAINE" ORGANIZATION IN COOPERATION WITH THE UKRAINIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY, INDICATES THAT RUSSIAN FORCES FORCIBLY DEPORTED MORE THAN 19,2023 CHILDREN UNTIL APRIL 2022, ADDING THAT THIS FIGURE DOES NOT REFLECT ACTUAL CASES THAT MAY FAR EXCEED THIS FIGURE. The Conflict Observatory, launched by the US State Department in cooperation with Yale University's Humanitarian Research Laboratory in May 2023 to analyze and document the operations of Russian forces in Ukraine, announced in February 6 that the Russian federal government had systematically transferred at least <>,<> children from Ukraine to adoption facilities or educational centers in Crimea and mainland Russia.

Sergei Dvornik, Ukraine's representative to the United Nations, says that the Russian authorities have made changes to legislation in order to grant these children a Russian passport, allowing them to be quickly adopted by Russian families and making it difficult to trace them in the future by their real families. According to Sergey, this comes in the context of Russia's efforts to "destroy the Ukrainian nation and extract its younger generations."

According to the Conflict Monitor report, there are 43 facilities involved in hosting Ukrainian children, including 7 camps in Crimea, 34 camps spread across the Russian country, in addition to a psychiatric hospital in Crimea and a medical center in Moscow for children with special needs. Most of those camps are located near the Black Sea, and the furthest is in Magadan, about 4,<> miles from the Russian-Ukrainian border.

Restoration camps

Most of these camps take on an entertaining appearance, taking children on vacations there, while others are facilities used to house children until they are adopted by a Russian family. However, as confirmed by the Conflict Monitor report, the camps participate in efforts to re-educate children, according to the Russian narrative, and some of them offer "military training" to these children.

The first mass transfer of children was spotted days before the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, when 500 orphaned children were transferred from the Donetsk region, and the Russian government announced at the time that the reason behind the move was to protect the children from a possible attack by the Ukrainian armed forces against Donetsk and Lugansk. Groups of orphans were transported after the invasion began to the Romashka sports complex in the Rostov region north of Moscow, according to Peter Andreyuchenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol. By March 2022, additional groups of children had left Ukraine to go to free "recreational camps" in Russia.

On the other hand, Russia denies the Ukrainian and Western narrative, and it is reported that these children arrived on Russian territory voluntarily or within their families, whom Moscow estimated at about 5.1 million Ukrainian refugees in January 2023. Russia maintains that the allegations of the abduction of Ukrainian children are nothing but a Ukrainian propaganda campaign to discredit the Russian government.

The official Russian version says that these children move to Russian territory for various reasons, first to attend free recreational camps, or in the framework of evacuating frontline areas, or in order to receive medical care that is not available in Ukrainian territory, and finally to be adopted by a Russian family in the event that the child is an orphan, and that all these children - except for adopted orphans - return again to their parents in Ukraine after the end of the camps or "secure" the areas from which they were evacuated.

Children's journey in the heart of Russia

(Shutterstock)

Regardless of how Ukrainian children arrived in Russia, there is a clear path for these children to take once they arrive in Moscow. First of all, Russia divides Ukrainian children into 4 categories: the first category includes children with clear parents and family, the second category includes those whom Russia considers orphans, the third category includes children with special needs, who were previously under the care of Ukrainian state institutions before February 2022, and finally there are children who are not embraced by a family as a result of war conditions.

The Conflict Monitor report monitors the journey of children already from a Ukrainian family, as information indicates that families do not pay for their children to go to recreational camps, especially children from the Donetsk, Lugansk and Kherson regions, and that funding comes from regional governments in Russia. It is clear that many low-income parents want their children to take advantage of a free holiday, and some hope to protect their children from the chaos of the ongoing fighting, and see these camps as an opportunity for their child to have good health care and food, which may not be available in Ukraine at the moment. Other cases where children are sent after exerting pressure on parents are also documented.

Most importantly, some children are not returned to Ukraine after the camp is over, and lose contact with their parents. In many cases, parents have to make a difficult and dangerous journey within Russian territory in order to recover their children. A woman in the city of Kherson, who sent her 14-year-old son to a summer camp in Crimea, told the British newspaper "The Guardian" that her child was detained there for more than two months, despite the announced camp period of only two weeks, before a series of voice messages were received by the camp commander telling her that the child would not be allowed to return because of his pro-Ukrainian views.

Yunarmia is a Russian national movement whose members master the basics of the military, and its membership is open to every Russian child aged 8 years or older. (Reuters)

However, this situation does not reflect the general picture, especially with regard to children with families in Ukraine, as these children often return to their families according to the schedule, after the child receives an educational program about the Russian state. The courses of this program often vary from the curriculum, field trips to cultural or national sites throughout the country, and lectures from veterans and historians in Russia. In one such meeting, for example, Sergey Kravtsov, the Russian Minister of Education, spoke to Ukrainian teenagers: "Many of you do not know that there was a time when we lived in the same country, we had victories and achievements, a common culture and language."

Military exercises are also part of teenage camps; in Crimea, for example, a camp called the "School of Future Leaders" was organized by the Yunarmia movement, a Russian national movement whose members master the basics of the military and whose membership is open to every Russian child aged 8 and over. During this camp, which was attended by nearly 50 Ukrainian children, the children were able to handle military equipment, drive trucks, and also studied firearms. UNARMIA representatives also visited the children of a school in the Russian-controlled Kherson region, where they also talked about the concept of the motherland and the requirements that future defenders of Russia must meet.

Donbass orphans

Maria Lvova Belova, Commissioner for Children's Rights of the President of the Russian Federation. She is accused of stealing Ukraine's children. (Anadolu)

According to the US Conflict Monitor, the real crisis lies in the children Moscow considers orphans or those who have lost their parents due to the war, especially in light of the allegations that not all of these children are already orphans. The Ukrainian government had told the United Nations before the invasion that some children in orphanages in Ukraine were not orphans and did not suffer from illness, and they were in an institution because their families only suffered from difficult circumstances, or they were denied the right to care for children under Ukrainian law.

These are called "social orphans" and make up 9 out of 10 inmates in Ukrainian orphanages. According to the Conflict Observatory, a group of alleged orphans aged between nine months and five years was transported from the Donetsk region to the Moscow region via a Russian Aerospace Force aircraft, accompanied by the Commissioner for Children's Rights, Maria Lvova Belova, in October 2022. Maria Belova is the first organizer and supervisor of the deportation of children from Ukrainian territory, and the International Criminal Court issued an earlier arrest sentence for war crimes, foremost of which was the forced deportation of children.

It is worth noting that Belova has 5 children with her husband, a computer scientist who later turned into an Orthodox priest, and adopted 5 other children, including a Ukrainian teenager from the city of Mariupol, and is also the legal guardian of a number of children with special needs, who receive care in charitable organizations founded by Maria herself. Belova provides a model for the fate of Ukrainian orphans or those without clear families, many of whom are enrolled in education camps, before being adopted by Russian families and integrated into Russian society, making their identification or future return to Ukraine unattainable.