THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Russians Took Their Children. These Mothers Went and Got Them Back.

Making a nerve-wracking 3,000-mile journey
from Ukraine, into Russia-occupied territory,
and back again, a group of mothers managed
to recover their children from the custody
of the Russian authorities.

For weeks after Russian troops forcibly removed Natalya Zhornyk’s teenage son from his school last fall, she had no idea where he was or what had happened to him.

Then came a phone call.

“Mom, come and get me,” said her son, Artem, 15. He had remembered his mother’s phone number and borrowed the school director’s cellphone.

Ms. Zhornyk made him a promise: “When the fighting calms down, I will come.”

Artem and a dozen schoolmates had been loaded up by Russian troops and transferred to a school farther inside Russian-occupied Ukraine.

While Ms. Zhornyk was relieved to know where he was being held, reaching him would not be easy. They were now on different sides of the front line of a full-blown war, and border crossings from Ukraine into Russian-occupied territory were closed.

But months later, when a neighbor brought back one of her son’s schoolmates, she learned about a charity that was helping mothers bring their children home.

Since it is illegal for men of military age to leave Ukraine now, in March Ms. Zhornyk and a group of women assisted by Save Ukraine completed a nerve-wracking, 3,000-mile journey through Poland, Belarus and Russia to gain entry to Russian-occupied
territory in eastern Ukraine and Crimea to retrieve Artem and 15 other children.

Then they had to take another circuitous journey back. “Come on, come on,” urged Ms. Zhornyk, as a cluster of children, laden with bags and suitcases, emerged hesitantly through the barriers at a border crossing from Belarus into Ukraine. She had
crossed with her son just hours earlier and pushed forward impatiently to embrace the next group.

“There are no words for all the emotions,” Ms. Zhornyk, 31, said, describing her reunion with Artem. “I was full of emotion, and nervous, nervous.”

In the 13 months since the invasion, thousands of Ukrainian children have been displaced, moved or forcibly transferred to camps or institutions in Russia or Russian-controlled territory, in what Ukraine and rights advocates have condemned as war crimes.

The fate of those children has become a desperate tug of war between Ukraine and Russia, and formed the basis of an arrest warrant issued last month by the International Criminal Court accusing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Maria Lvova-Belova,
his commissioner for children’s rights, of illegally transferring them.

Once under Russian control, the children are subject to re-education, fostering and adoption by Russian families — practices that have touched a particular nerve even amid the carnage that has killed and displaced so many Ukrainians.

Ukrainian officials and human rights organizations have described these forced removals as a plan to steal a generation of Ukraine’s youth, turning them into loyal Russian citizens and eradicating Ukrainian culture to the point of committing genocide.

[For the rest of the story, ask Jack Froth-a-the-Mouth if he still buys the FOX story
that Russia is helping these poor Ukraine kids before sending them back to their parents].

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