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 to their network of sinister “summer camps,” which are used to capture large numbers of Ukrainian boys and girls for adoption as part of the Kremlin’s genocidal strategy to crush the country.
Families who refuse to comply are threatened with losing parental rights over all their children and warned they will “never see them again,” according to a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The horrific revelation comes as kyiv helps build the International Criminal Court’s war crimes case against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his aide Maria Lvova-Belova, who is the architect of his child-abduction atrocities.
Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights and rehabilitation, says Moscow is locking up captured children for nearly a year in “so-called summer camps” that include windowless industrial-style buildings.
Avaaz members and Ukrainian refugees place teddy bears in front of the European Commission in Brussels to denounce the alleged kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children by Russia on February 23, 2022
She says many families tried to refuse to send their children to this network of camps across Russia, only to be threatened and forced into compliance by Kremlin officials and their henchmen in regions taken over by Putin.
She said: ‘In some occupied areas it seems that locals were paying a so-called tax with their children. The authorities approach the family and say: ‘We know that your family has four children, so you have to send one of them to the camp. You choose which one it will be.’
“When parents say no, they are threatened by saying, ‘We will take away all your parental rights and we will take away all your children and you will never see them again. So you have to decide which one of them is going to go to camp.'”
A 15-year-old boy from the Kharkiv region told how he was held in a camp for nine months after his father was suspected of helping Ukrainian troops and tortured in a basement. In the end, his mother rescued him with the help of kyiv.
Russia is using a chilling tactic against Ukrainians trapped in the 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 in reality it was a huge hangar, like a warehouse, with no windows, where 15 of them were kept,” Herasymchuk said. “They were allowed out once a day for a short walk, but other than that they were kept locked up. They had bunk beds, nothing else.”
“This young man would say it was an imprisonment, and there is enormous 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 the Kremlin may have abducted 300,000 children.
Ms Herasymchuk said they are initially taken to areas of Donetsk captured in 2014, where they are given Russian passports and phones before being dispersed to host families as far away as Siberia for quick integration into their society.
She has discovered a number of Russian methods for seizing her children: grabbing those who lost their parents in the invasion, stealing those living in state institutions, taking them during “filtration” at the borders and expelling them as punishment for families deemed loyal to Ukraine.
In February 2023, Avaaz members and the Ukrainian diaspora set up mobile billboards near the United Nations headquarters in New York to denounce Putin’s abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children.
He said many of these children – even those who lost both parents in fighting – had siblings or other relatives, but “they are instantly deprived of the opportunity to have any contact with their families.”
The rescued children say they are given compulsory lessons in Russian citizenship and forced to sing the national anthem, then beaten and harassed if they continue to show sympathy for Ukraine.
One teenager who returned told me that his adoptive family “tried to turn me into a good Russian” while insisting that Ukraine was the enemy. “But I’m not stupid,” he said. “I would start arguing.” Such resistance is risky. There are documented cases of Ukrainians being given Russian conscription papers when they turn 18 to force them to fight against their own country.
Thousands of people have been separated from their families via camps. Parents are persuaded or forced to send their children back for a few weeks, but then authorities claim it is too dangerous to send them back, while intensively brainwashing them against their parents and their country for months.
The camps can be up to 5,000 miles from home, making it difficult and expensive for poorer Ukrainians living under occupation to reclaim them.
“And that’s when the organizers ask, ‘Why isn’t your mother coming? Maybe she doesn’t like you, maybe she sent you to this camp because she doesn’t need you,'” Ms. Herasymchuk said.
Local officials separated friends to further isolate the stolen children while continuing their indoctrination efforts, ensuring that even older teens “are broken and sometimes believe their parents didn’t want them back,” he said.
In another sickening twist, Ukraine is investigating reports that some children are being kidnapped after doctors diagnose mysterious illnesses and demand they be taken for urgent treatment.
Ms Herasymchuk says it is clear that the Kremlin has carefully prepared methods to brainwash them. “That is why we talk about genocide: the only reason the children suffered was because they were Ukrainian,” she said.
Additional information: Kate Baklitskaya
