Recent negotiations between the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia have covered a range of topics: from halting strikes on energy infrastructure and ensuring maritime security, to nuclear power plants and normalizing diplomatic relations. Yet one critical topic remains off the table: the fate of children forcibly taken from Ukraine to Russia.
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The arrest warrant issued for Vladimir Putin two years ago — for the very crime of child deportation — seems all but forgotten. What will happen to these children? Journalist Katya Bonch-Osmolovskaya, who has followed their fate for the past three years, investigates.
In the summer of 2023, I received a message from a resident of a small Russian town who told me that several orphaned children from Ukraine had been brought there. The children had been placed in a boarding school for children with intellectual disabilities located there, and had been given high doses of psychotropic drugs.
Children rarely leave such institutions. They are usually declared incapacitated and later transferred to adult psychiatric care facilities, where they remain for life.
Over the past three years, I have received dozens of similar messages about the fate of Ukrainian orphans in Russia — many of which I could not verify, including this one. But there were also many cases that could be investigated. Alongside colleagues from other media outlets, we published extensive reports on Ukrainian children who, against their will, ended up in a country that was waging war on their homeland.
What we uncovered is only a fraction of the full story. Since the war began in February 2022, hundreds such children have been placed in Russian orphanages and foster families. The process started even before the full-scale invasion: in the self-proclaimed republics of eastern Ukraine, authorities declared an “evacuation,” and children from orphanages were transferred en masse to various Russian regions. After Russian forces seized new Ukrainian territories, they took children from there as well — entire orphanages at a time.
High-ranking officials
Journalists, researchers and human rights activists worldwide have closely followed this process. Thanks to their work, we know how children were taken from Ukraine, moved between Russian regions, and placed with foster families. We know how some were returned to Ukraine, while those left behind in orphanages were subjected to endless propaganda about Ukraine’s “liberation from Nazis” and the heroism of Russian soldiers.
We also know how high-ranking Russian officials personally took in Ukrainian orphans: Children’s Ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova adopted a teenager from Mariupol, while Sergey Mironov, leader of the “A Just Russia” party, took in a girl from a Kherson orphanage — completely changing her identity in the process.
Some 100 children had been returned to Ukraine and other countries — out of the thousands taken
All of this led to the International Criminal Court in The Hague issuing an arrest warrant for both Putin and Lvova-Belova in March 2023. This also moved forward the process of returning the children to their homeland. Instead of reports about “rescues” and their placement in Russian families, the children’s ombudsman began regularly updating on their reunification with relatives. She said last month that a total of 100 children had been returned to Ukraine and other countries — out of the thousands taken.
But what about the rest? Here are just a few cases.
In the fall of 2022, three children taken from Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast were placed with Yulia Panina, an employee of the Roskomnadzor agency in the Russian city of Astrakhan that’s responsible for controlling mass media. Panina organizes care packages for Russian soldiers at the front and tells the children about her work in the agency: “The kids already know the basics. For example, that we don’t just blindly block things— we first respond, analyze, and start a dialogue. Working at Roskomnadzor is truly interesting and honorable.”
Among these “interesting and honorable” duties are making sure that Putin is not called a crab, a moth or a corrupt leader on the Internet, cleaning up compromising information about specific officials and organizing campaigns against people the authorities don’t want—but none of this is shared with the Ukrainian children in her care.
Some stories only come to light when it’s already too late.
Meanwhile, Arthur Zaitsev from Donetsk Oblast was sent to Yamal, where he was taken in by a local activist and foster mother of many children, Olga Druzhinina. “He has a home now and has settled in well at college,” she said about Zaitsev. But in December 2024, just before his 20th birthday, Arthur was drafted into the Russian army.
For some children, their stories only come to light when it’s already too late. One such case is that of Sasha Yakushchenko, a teenager taken from Ukraine’s Kherson region and placed with a foster family in Russia’s Krasnodar region. He was placed in a foster family in the Krasnodar region and committed suicide a few months later. The Russian authorities never reacted to his death, neither publicly nor when asked by our editorial board. “In accordance with the law on personal data, we cannot provide a response,” the local guardianship office said.
Another child taken to Russia was Ilya Vashchenko, who traveled with the same girl later adopted by MP Mironov and his fifth wife. Once in Moscow, the high-ranking couple did not want to adopt Ilya due to his health condition. Two and a half years after he was taken, Ilya’s fate remains unknown.
Talked about less and less
Two years have passed since the warrant was issued against Putin and Lvova-Belova. For the officials themselves, little has changed — Lvova-Belova mocks the warrant on federal channels, and Putin merely avoids traveling to countries obligated to enforce the ICC’s rulings — though even that isn’t consistent.
Most of the orphaned Ukrainian children who were taken to Russia are still there. They are talked about less and less, and tracing their fates has become increasingly difficult. The U.S. is ending funding for Yale University’s program that tracks children forcibly relocated to Russia, and the database of 30,000 documented cases was nearly deleted.
World leaders occasionally mention the return of these children as a topic for peace negotiations but rarely propose concrete action. According to people familiar with the process, Lvova-Belova’s office will only release children to blood relatives. Some families are required to provide DNA tests to prove kinship or even obtain a Russian passport for the child in order to bring them out of the country. There is no talk of mass return of removed orphans.
In the meantime, these children continue to disappear into Russia — writing letters to soldiers at the front, going to serve in the Russian army, listening to fairytales about Roskomnadzor — and slowly losing their ties to their families and their homeland.
