It’s a deep pain that Mykola Kuleba carries: the unknown fate of 20,000 Ukrainian children. As the former presidential commissioner for Children’s Rights, a role that dealt with child trafficking, Kuleba initially set up a rescue organisation called Save Ukraine to help relocate Ukrainian children from Crimea after Russia’s invasion of the territory 12 years ago. The work of the 54-year-old only magnified and intensified when Russia launched a full-frontal attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Four-and-a-half years on, Kuleba can rattle off various statistics that offer only a modicum of hope for a generation of Ukrainian children. Initially he and his team rescued more than 165,000 children and family members from the front lines. But given the intensity of the fighting during Moscow’s full mobilisation, the numbers rescued from Russian-occupied areas such as Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as from inside Russia, has been much lower, about 1800 children.
But tens of thousands remain unaccounted for, Kuleba said, adding that in the past three months 130 children had been rescued. These are youngsters who were stolen, ripped from their families, orphans, others in care, some even paid for by Russian officials lying to Ukrainian parents that they would be well looked after. Kuleba is in London with co-worker Anastasiia Dovbnia to have meetings with British government officials before a visit to Canada and then back to Ukraine. In Kyiv he has about 25 key people still delving into social media and using contacts to convince young people in the occupied territories that the dreadful stories they have heard about Ukraine are not true. “We are rescuing them with their active consent, but they need, for some reason, to believe that everything that they’ve been told for nearly five years or even for 12 years is not true,’’ he said.
These beliefs are deeply embedded fears of being tortured by “Ukrainian Nazis”, and of being killed. In what Kuleba describes as Russian state policy, Russian school teachers have told the children, from many different locations across the Donbas areas and Crimea, that Ukrainians even eat children. One 11-year-old girl told her Save Ukraine counsellors that she and her classmates were forced at school to watch a film about Ukrainians cutting open the belly of a pregnant Russian woman. Kuleba’s work has earned him a nomination for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, an honour he says helps shine a spotlight on the vicious Russian strategy to “brainwash and then conscript the children”. He says Russia’s intent to turn Ukrainian children into a Russian fighting force is “a clear Russian plan as to how they can destroy us, to annihilate us as a nation’’.
Kuleba believes about 30 per cent of the Ukraine population remains in occupied areas, and anyone identified as being pro-Ukrainian, who worked previously for the Ukrainian authorities or crossed the Russian regime in some way, was arrested for terrorism or state treason and their children taken away and placed with Russian families. Years after the invasion this is still going on. In recent weeks Save Ukraine heard about a seven-year-old girl and her mother struggling to survive in the occupied areas after the disappearance of the child’s father and the death of her grandmother. The child has been forced to attend a children’s military camp to prepare her for the Russian army. The mother, horrified, cannot protest because the Russians will accuse her of not caring enough. In another recent case a 16-year-old boy was forced to ring his father to come home from work, whereupon he was beaten for hours including losing all his teeth. The boy was told a similar fate awaited him unless he signed up to the Russian military there and then.
All the while Russian families have relocated into the war zones, attracted by the free or heavily discounted housing. In Mariupol for instance, Chechnyan families have moved in. Now Kuleba’s fight for the minds and hearts of the Ukrainian youngsters caught in these zones has evolved. He says the children in the occupied territories have been so brainwashed for so long throughout their formative years, learning only Russian language, Russian culture and being bombarded with the deeply insidious Russian propaganda that it is only those Ukrainian teenagers fearing being drafted into the Russian army that are willing to try to escape. Officially Russia conscripts the teenagers as soon as they are 18, but anecdotally it appears to happen much earlier. When they are 14 they get sent to Russian military schools and camps. Kuleba tells the case of a 16-year-old who crossed the border into Ukraine but is distraught because his eight-year-old brother doesn’t believe Ukraine is safe and is instead “a proud Russian”.
Save Ukraine’s focus is on helping prepare the teenagers with the excuses, script, even providing host Ukraine families, to manage the difficult border crossings. Each case is handled differently according to their situations. “We make a full profile, to understand how we should react to different specific conditions in which this child may appear to be in the occupation,’’ Kuleba said. “The route will differ massively, depending on if the child is an orphan or not, if they are above 18 years old and have a draft notice in their hands already or not, if they have family members serving the Ukrainian army.” In some instances, the teenager will travel vast differences into deepest Russia in order to find a way out of the country. But the border crossing, no matter where, is the most challenging. One in seven don’t get through the checkpoint. Others are heavily beaten and tortured, sexually assaulted or threatened with violence against their mothers to challenge their story, before they can cross.
The case studies are horrific: one mother and her daughter were both raped in front of each other. Another mother with her son was tortured for three days with a bag over her head. Kuleba’s team is ready to help as soon as they cross, assisting them with comfort and care, as well as education. Of the 1800 children they have assisted in the past few years, more than 250 are orphans who had been placed with Russian foster families. Save Ukraine has been providing education and trauma counselling programs inside Ukraine which helps 3000 children a month. A new Ukraine children’s justice centre, with the capacity to help 500 children, specialises in helping those who experienced sexual abuse. Kuleba knows his work is life long. “We lost almost 50 per cent of Ukrainian children in Crimea in the last 12 years due to the war,” he said. “After the second invasion 1.6 million of children were trapped in Russian occupied territories. “We lost them due to the occupation, and we don’t know how many of them stayed in the territories. It may be less than half of them, but we have no information about where they are.” Kuleba adds, with a heavy heart: “But we lost them, they are not in Ukraine.”
Source: Christian Post
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