Russia is using a chilling tactic against Ukrainians trapped in occupied territories by demanding a ‘tax’ from parents that involves handing over one of their children.
Officials tell parents they must select a child to send into their network of sinister ‘summer camps’, which are used to grab huge numbers of Ukrainian boys and girls for adoption as part of the Kremlin’s genocidal strategy to crush the country.
Families refusing to comply are threatened with losing parental rights over all their children and warned ‘you’ll never see them again’, according to a senior adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The horrifying revelation comes as Kyiv helps build the war crimes case started by the International Criminal Court against Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and his aide Maria Lvova-Belova, who is the architect of their child-snatching atrocities.
Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights and rehabilitation, says Moscow is locking up captured children for almost a year in ‘so-called summer camps’ that include industrial-style buildings without windows.
Avaaz members and Ukrainian refugees lay out teddy bears in front of the European Commission in Brussels to highlight the reported abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children by Russia on February 23, 2022Â
She says many families tried refusing to send children into this network of camps across Russia – only to be threatened and forced to comply by Kremlin officials and their stooges in the regions seized by Putin.
She said: ‘In some occupied areas it looks like locals were paying a so-called tax with their children. The authorities come to the family and say, ‘We know your family has four children so you have to send one child into the camp. You choose which one it will be’.’
‘When the parents say no they threaten them, saying, ‘We will strip you of all parental rights and we will take all your kids away and you’ll never see them again. So you must decide which one is going into the camp’.’
One 15-year-old from the Kharkiv region told her he was held in a camp for nine months after his father was suspected of assisting Ukrainian troops and tortured in a basement. The teenager was retrieved eventually by his mother with Kyiv’s help.
Russia is using a chilling tactic against Ukrainians trapped in occupied territories by demanding a ‘tax’ from parents that involves handing over one of their children to Putin’s ‘summer camps’
‘The boy was taken to what the Russians call a summer camp but it was actually a huge hangar, like a warehouse, without windows, where 15 of them were kept,’ said Ms Herasymchuk. ‘They were allowed out once a day for a little stroll but apart from that they were kept locked inside. They had just bunk beds, nothing else.
‘This young man would say it was imprisonment – and there is huge pain in the boy’s eyes as he tells this story.’
Russia claims to have ‘rescued’ 744,000 Ukrainian children. Kyiv has confirmed 20,000 cases of child abduction but fears as many as 300,000 youngsters might have been kidnapped by the Kremlin.
Ms Herasymchuk said they are taken initially to areas of Donetsk captured in 2014, to be given Russian passports and phones before being dispersed to foster families as far away as Siberia for rapid integration into their society.
She has discovered a series of Russian methods for seizing their children: Grabbing those that lost parents in the invasion; stealing those living in state institutions; taking them during ‘filtration’ at borders; and removing them as punishment for families deemed loyal to Ukraine.
Avaaz members and the Ukrainian diaspora installed mobile billboards near the United Nations headquarters in New York in February 2023 to call out Putin’s abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children
She said many of these children – even those who lost both parents in fighting – had siblings or other relations but ‘they instantly take away the opportunity for these children to have any contact with relatives’.
Rescued children say they are given compulsory Russian citizenship lessons and forced to sing the national anthem – then beaten and bullied if continuing to show sympathies towards Ukraine.
One returned teenager told me his foster family ‘tried to convert me to being a good Russian’ while insisting Ukraine was the enemy. ‘But I’m not a fool,’ he said. ‘I would start arguing.’ Such resistance is risky. There are documented cases of Russian call-up papers being served on Ukrainians when they turn 18 to force them to fight against their own country.
Thousands have been detached from families through use of the camps. Parents are persuaded or forced to send children for a few weeks – then officials claim it is too dangerous to return them while intensively brainwashing them against their parents and their country for months.
The camps can be up to 5,000 miles from home, which makes it challenging and costly for poorer Ukrainians living under occupation to fetch them back.
‘And that’s when the organisers ask, ‘Why is your mum not coming – maybe she doesn’t like you, maybe she sent you to this camp because she doesn’t need you’,’ said Ms Herasymchuk.
L ocal officials split up friends to isolate the stolen children still further as they continue their indoctrination efforts, ensuring that even older teenagers ‘would be torn up and sometimes believe that their parents did not want to take them back,’ she said.
In another sickening twist, Ukraine is investigating claims some children are abducted after medics diagnose mysterious diseases and demand they be taken away for urgent treatment.
Ms Herasymchuk says it is clear the Kremlin has carefully prepared methods for brainwashing them. ‘This is why we are talking about genocide – the only reason children suffered is because they were Ukrainian,’ she said.
Additional reporting: Kate Baklitskaya