A 17-year-old Ukrainian who’d been forcibly taken from occupied Mariupol to Russia at the start of its full-scale invasion was trying to return home, but was captured by Russian security forces at the border with Belarus and will be sent back to Russia.
Maria Lvova-Belova, the so-called ombudsman for Children’s Rights in Russia, held a press conference on Tuesday to share the news that Russian security forces had detained Bogdan Ermokhin and returned him to a “foster family” in Russia.
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Lvova-Belova said that Ermokhin had been emotionally manipulated and threatened by Ukrainian “agents” into returning back to Ukraine, where he has a sister. The agents supposedly organized transport and financial support for Ermokhin. “He was deceptively lured out,” she said, “at the last moment, we managed to stop him.”
Ermokhin’s story illustrates the often unknown fates of thousands of Ukrainian minors who have been forcibly relocated to Russia since the start of the invasion. One has even been adopted by Maria Lvova-Belova herself.
Crime, not a “rescue”
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Bogdan Ermokhin was an orphan and his legal guardian was the director of the Mariupol college where he was studying, the BBC Russian Service reports. Lvova-Belova said Bogdan had been among 31 children who were “found in the cellars of Mariupol,” abandoned by their parents after the shelling of the city began.
The children were first taken to Donetsk, and from there to a sanatorium in the Moscow region, where Ermokhin was later taken in by a foster family. Philip Golovnya, the Ukrainian child adopted by Lvova-Belova herself, was reportedly In the same group of minors.
Dmytro Lubinets, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, responded to the announcement, saying, “It should be noted that this young man has Ukrainian citizenship. His forced transfer to the territory of the aggressor country is therefore not ‘rescue,’ as Lvova-Belova says, but a crime.”
Lubinets added that Bogdan’s story is further evidence of Russia’s continued illegal abductions of Ukrainian children. “I emphasize once again that these are our Ukrainian children and Russia will be held accountable for every crime.”
“Re-educating” children
On March 17, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, alleging responsibility for the unlawful deportation and transfer of children during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Russian authorities are “re-educating” at least 6,000 Ukrainian children.
On April 5, British diplomats blocked the UN webcast of an informal security council meeting on Ukraine at which Lvov-Belova is due to speak on Wednesday. “She should not be afforded a UN platform to spread disinformation,” a spokesperson for Britain’s UN mission in New York said in a statement. “If she wants to give an account of her actions, she can do so in The Hague.”
The Ukrainian website Children of War reports the deportation of 16,226 Ukrainian children to Russian territory. So far, only 308 have been returned home. In February 2023, the Humanities Research Laboratory at the Yale School of Public Health found 43 facilities in Russia that housed Ukrainian children.
According to experts, the Russian authorities are “re-educating” at least 6,000 Ukrainian children with Russian propaganda and ideology.
What is happening to these children, as well as Ukrainian teenager Bogdan Ermokhin, remains unclear.
