MOSCOW — In mid-February 2022, the authorities of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics announced a mass evacuation and began transporting children from orphanages as well as unaccompanied children to Russia. Since then, some 2,500 children from Donbass and other captured Ukrainian territories could have been sent to Russia, according calculations by Important Stories.
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The first children coming from Ukraine, in April 2022, were initially placed in families in Moscow region. Almost immediately, the region developed a special training program for parents who take in such children to raise them. Officially, the program is meant to prepare families to receive “children from the combat zone,” but in substance, it is obvious that it is a question of those children being taken from the occupied territories to Russia.
Important Stories reports on what they teach Russians who want to bring these children into their families.
Before starting a training program, potential adoptive parents undergo an interview to clarify their “motivations, expectations, and understanding of the legal and other consequences of adopting children who arrived from combat zones,” according to this document.
Parents are asked whether they have relatives or friends from Ukraine, how the child’s mentality and nationality influence his upbringing, and whether there are certain traditions in the family for raising boys and girls.
Difficulties encountered
An employee of a charity foundation that helps orphans said anonymously that the main goal of a separate training program for displaced children is to inform potential adoptive parents about what awaits them, as not everyone is ready for such difficulties.
“At first [when the transfer of children from Ukraine to Russia began], the caretakers’ telephones were ringing off the hook with people wanting to take a child into their family. But then the problems started, because children with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are a very serious test for a family,” the employee said.
“These children won’t say right away ‘Mama, I’m so grateful to you. Let me wash the dishes for you.’ They are more likely to misbehave, disobey, not clean up after themselves, smear feces on the walls, fight or be withdrawn. It’s not calm,” the employee said.
There are a lot of problems in Ukraine, and, after all, the children are from there and are embittered.
He estimates that of 100 people who go through the regular training for foster parents, about 70 subsequently do not foster children. This number may be even higher in the program for Ukrainian children, which is now required for families hoping to take in a child.
“This is now very strict. Parents must take the training and obtain a certificate to take in a child,” said an employee at a training center. She said that a separate program for displaced children is justified because many of the children have PTSD and find it difficult to adapt to another country.
“There are a lot of problems in Ukraine, and, after all, the children are from there and are embittered. They have lived through and seen everything: the war and their own way of doing things,” the employee said.
All about the program
Adoptive parents, including Anastasia, who have taken the training program praise it. “The program is necessary and up to date,” she said, “The training explains everything that is possible based on the situation in these territories, on the child’s psyche and its reaction to trauma. It is a little unfinished, because the program was developed quite quickly, haphazardly; it is not as in-depth as we would have liked.”
A minimum of 50 such courses are planned for 2024. According to training center employees, two to 10 people attend each course. In 2023, there were almost twice as many classes in this program, which was supposed to be held 92 times per year. It is difficult to say how many families completed the program since the war began two years ago. But in 2022, the Moscow region’s support services for adoptive families were required to conduct at least three courses per year.
How can we create a multicultural environment if people are arrested for Ukrainian songs?
One of the training modules is devoted to problems related to “national and cultural characteristics.” Adoptive families are taught to overcome “difficulties in cross-national differences” and are recommended to “create a multicultural environment in the family.” How to do this given the current conditions in Russia is unclear, say the psychologists interviewed by Important Stories.
“How can we create a multicultural environment if people are arrested for Ukrainian songs? If a child says their country was attacked, how should the foster parents respond? What needs to be done from a professional point of view cannot be done, so we did this,” said one specialist with experience working with orphans and adoptive parents, who requested anonymity.
Social and national-psychological character
Training instructors say that to help a child from Donbass adapt to Russia, parents need to know the typical traits of the “social and national-psychological character” of their people.
“At any moment a situation may arise affecting both nationality and mentality in the backdrop of some political interactions. The better we understand the mentality of these peoples and the mentality of their children, the more we can be useful and reliable for the child. The national identity of a child is a reality that must be taken into consideration and worked with,” instructors say.
Yet they do not specify how exactly parents need to work with the mentality of children from Ukraine. Anastasia said the program implies that the culture and language of the displaced children are the same as in Russia.
One foster family could not cope; the parents were so drained, they begged us to take back the children.
“The training takes into account the fact that we still have one national identity. When the children from the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic arrived, there were no culture or language problems. The problems were mostly everyday ones because their orphanages were not as developed as ours, with no computer or kitchen activities. Our children know how to cook, but children there have never seen anything like that,” Anastasia said.
Some families cannot cope with raising children from Donbass. Children who survived war, who were forcibly deported from their home country and do not have adult relatives nearby, get stuck in the system and are subject to secondary orphanhood; they are returned to the orphanage.
“In our practice, one family could not cope; the parents were so drained, they begged us to take back the children. So we removed the children from that family,” said a training center employee.
A “second homeland”
One adoption specialist said that “Russia must officially join the international moratorium on the adoption of children left without parental care as a result of military operations. Information about each child should be communicated to child services in Ukraine. No decisions about the child’s fate should be made without them.”
Currently, many of the at least 42 institutions in the Moscow region that offer training classes are so-called family centers that house children from Ukraine. For example, two brothers from the Donetsk region, who were initially taken to different regions, ended up in the Lyuberetsky family center. Their profiles were published in the federal orphan data bank with a note that the brothers could be adopted. Their profiles have already been deleted, meaning they were probably taken in by a family.
Our main task is to create conditions so the children understand that this is a second homeland.
Nothing is said about the process for finding the relatives of displaced children — either in the family training programs or in the trainings for employees of child services. Instead, they recommend creating a “second homeland” for children.
The instructors say that “the children came to a different country. They fell into a situation where they have no home, parents or even close relatives. So our main task is to create conditions so the children understand they are not just entering an adoptive family but also that this is a second homeland for them, which will accept them and help them overcome difficulties.”
