As territories shift and divide families, desperate parents are travelling to Russia to find their children, many of whom have been moved into military camps or orphanages
Ukrainian children from a Donetsk orphanage at a camp in Zolotaya Kosa, Russia. Up to 35,000 Ukrainian children may be held in Russia, with many feared to have been adopted. Photograph: AP
As many as 35,000 Ukrainian children are still missing and thought to be held in Russia or Russian-occupied territories, according to an American team of experts, with families saying they are being forced to take desperate and risky measures to try to rescue them.
As Russian forces began their invasion in February 2022, children were abducted from care homes, from the battlefield after the death of their parents, or under coercion directly from their families.
Russia has rejected demands for the children to be returned, with an official accusing Ukraine of “staging a show on the topic of lost children” during ceasefire talks in Turkey this month. Speaking to the Guardian, one mother has described her own dramatic rescue of her two teenage sons who were held in a camp in Russia for almost six months.
After Russian forces occupied Natalia’s home city of Kherson on the eastern border of Ukraine, in September 2022, a neighbour advised her to send her sons to a children’s camp in Anapa, a seaside resort town in Russia. “The 21-day trip was free and they were meant to return to Kherson at the end. The boys wanted to go too, but it was a big mistake on my part to allow it,” she says.
In late 2022, Ukrainian forces liberated Natalia’s city, but her children were in a camp on the other side of the frontline and Russia would not let them return home. “The camp authorities refused to let the children leave without my physical presence,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do.”…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/27/russia-ukrainian-children-abduction-war-crime
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Arms maker BAE Systems makes record profit amid Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars
The USA’s role in the Ukraine crisis (2022)
Trump’s Christian Fascists and the War on Palestine
The Mask is Off. After Ukraine, imperialism is now the norm
Alfred McCoy: Geopolitics of the Ukraine War, Putin & Xi Jinping in the Struggle over Eurasia
Russian Nobel Peace laureate slams Putin’s ‘insane and criminal war’ on Ukraine
The Stalinist order, the Putinist order; Russia’s culture of bureaucratic corruption
The invasion of Iraq was a turning point on to a path that led towards Ukraine
After the truth-shower 