During the 14 months for which Veronika Vlasenko attended school in Russia, she was regularly told by teachers and fellow students that she would never be able to go home to Ukraine. “Every day they said to me that I would be staying here for ever and would never leave Russia,” she said. “They told me that Ukraine doesn’t exist, that it never existed, that we’re all Russians … At times the other kids would beat me for being pro-Ukrainian.”
Veronika was one of nearly 20,000 children documented by Ukrainian authorities as having been taken from Ukraine to Russia over the past two years. The authorities believe the real number is probably 10 times that, while Russian officials have even boasted of moving 700,000 Ukrainian children to Russia.
Nearly two years into the war, there are growing fears that if no way is found to bring the children home soon, Russia’s systemic programme to “re-educate” Ukrainian children could prove devastatingly effective. Ukrainian officials are calling on international organisations and neutral countries who may still hold some sway in Moscow to put pressure on Russia.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
During the 14 months that Veronika Vlasenko attended school in Russia, she was regularly told by teachers and fellow students that she would never be able to go home to Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials are calling on international organisations and neutral countries who may still hold some sway in Moscow to put pressure on Russia.
“Russia is actively erasing their Ukrainian identity and inflicting unbelievable emotional and psychological damage,” said Latvia’s president, Edgars Rinkēvičs, at a conference devoted to raising awareness of the issue held in Riga on Thursday.
In November a BBC investigation uncovered that an infant girl stolen from a children’s home in occupied Kherson had been transferred to Moscow, issued with new documents with a changed name and claiming she was born in Russia, and then adopted by a Russian political leader and Putin ally, Sergei Mironov.
Veronika’s grandmother travelled thousands of miles from Kharkiv to Lipetsk on a circuitous route via Poland and the Baltic states to rescue her granddaughter and bring her back to Ukraine, where she has been reunited with her mother.
Russian authorities have claimed that Ukrainian children whose parents or guardians travel to Russia are able to take them home, and in some cases such as Veronika’s this has eventually worked.
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