The New York Times traced how a web of officials and politicians aligned with President Vladimir V. Putin’s party carried out a campaign to permanently transfer Ukrainian children from Kherson.
As news of Russia’s invasion spread through Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Dr Natalia Lukina was waiting for a taxi at her home.
It was 6am, and she was eager to get to work at Kherson Children’s Home, a state-run foster home for institutionalised children with special needs, where she served as a doctor.
By the time she arrived, the rumble of artillery fired by Russian troops advancing on Kherson City, the region’s capital, was already reverberating through the hallways. The doctor and her fellow caregivers faced a wrenching problem: how to protect the dozens of vulnerable children.
They were all infants and toddlers, and some had serious disabilities, such as cerebral palsy. Some had living parents who retained limited custody over them, while others had been removed from troubled homes or abandoned.
“Who else would have stayed behind to look after them?” Lukina said about her decision to remain with the children. “Imagine if we all turned our backs and left?”
Olena Korniyenko, director of the foster home and the children’s legal guardian, had prepared emergency bags for the children two weeks earlier, and she had stocked the home with boxes of food, water and diapers.
But the building was not equipped to withstand gunfire or shelling, and police had already fled the city. When Korniyenko called the police chief to ask about using their underground bunker just 300 yards away, he warned her that the station would become a military target.
With limited options, Korniyenko searched online for a map of nearby bomb shelters and found one within walking distance.
Amid exchanges of fire, the staff carried the children and their mattresses by foot and stroller to a concrete basement, taking with them food, medicine, electric pumps and feeding tubes for the sickest children.
A local pastor got word of their plight later that day and urged the foster home staff to take the children to his church, where he could at least provide heat, electricity and food.
So the staff moved the children again, sweeping them into hiding in the basement of Holhofa Church. They stacked boxes of diapers in the windows to keep anyone from seeing in.
One nurse, Kateryna Sirodchuk, said they were afraid that Russian forces would take the children away. “We feared that they could come and take everything under their control,” she said.
And their fears soon came true: On April 25, 2022, Russian officials found the children and took them under their own authority, eventually moving them 290km from home — all while filming them for propaganda.
Evidence shows the transfer was part of the broader, systematic campaign by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his political allies to strip the most vulnerable victims of the war of their Ukrainian identity. The New York Times reviewed Russian social media posts; obtained photos, videos, text messages and documents; and interviewed more than 110 caregivers, legal experts, and Russian and Ukrainian officials to trace the lives and movement of the children as they were taken into Russian custody.
What happened to them next, legal experts say, may amount to a war crime.
Two weeks into the invasion, Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, sat across from Putin in a televised meeting to ask for his help.
She wanted to resettle young Ukrainian children from child-care facilities caught in the crossfire of war. He promised to remove any legal “red tape” so they could be placed permanently with Russian families.
In pronouncements before the invasion, Putin had made clear that he sought the complete cultural assimilation of Ukrainian towns and cities he believed were historically Russian. And now, as the officials shook hands, a plan for the permanent transfer and deportation of their youngest residents was set in motion.
“They believe deep down that the children are Russian,” said Serhii Plokhy, a Ukraine historian at Harvard University. “You speed up their Russian-ness by kidnapping them.”
For weeks, Ukrainian officials and police officers had struggled to find a way to evacuate the children from Holhofa Church, which was by then occupied territory. They blamed Russia for refusing to open a humanitarian corridor to allow citizens to flee from the shelling.
In April, a Ukrainian commissioner made a plea on Telegram to help rescue them, publicising their location in the process.
Hours later, armed men led by a Russian official who called himself Navigator showed up at the church and demanded that the children be returned to Kherson Children’s Home. Cameras from a Crimea-based propaganda outlet filmed their arrival, and the resulting story accused the Ukrainian authorities of kidnapping the children.
The pastor protested, claiming the children were safer in his basement. But the caregivers had little choice but to obey the orders and take the children back to the foster home in Kherson City, where occupation forces had a tighter grip.
Lukina later said the move made her suspect that the children would eventually be taken from Ukraine, because “if they didn’t need those children, why would they have made us leave the church?”
In the months that followed, entourages of armed men in Russian military uniforms made frequent, unannounced visits to the foster home to monitor the children and their caregivers.
“They asked, ‘Are all of the children here?,’” Lukina recalled. “We understood that if the children weren’t there, we would be gone, too.”
By the spring of 2022, the occupation of Kherson had become a template for the forced assimilation of a Ukrainian city and its residents: A new occupation government was appointed in Kherson, and a Russian flag was raised outside the foster home, where politicians and armed soldiers made trips delivering aid to the children.
Lukina scoffed when she recalled some of the impractical donations, which included Russian textbooks and huge packs of soda.
“You know that children can’t drink soda, right?” she said. “They probably just wanted to show the world that they were saving Ukrainian children.”
For the next several months, Russian officials documented their efforts to help the children on their popular channels on Telegram, a messaging platform used widely in Russia.
Navigator, the man who had ordered the children removed from the church, visited the foster home repeatedly. He would later be identified as Igor Kastyukevich, a Russian member of parliament from Putin’s political party, United Russia.
Anna Kuznetsova, a deputy chair in the Russian parliament and Lvova-Belova’s predecessor as children’s rights commissioner, travelled from Moscow to deliver baby products on behalf of the party. “#WeDon’tAbandonOurOwn,” she wrote on Telegram, using a pro-war hashtag to suggest that the children belonged to Russia.
In interviews with the Times, Russian officials echoed that view, saying that the children from Kherson were Russian.
That May, Putin fulfilled his promise to Lvova-Belova by issuing a presidential decree that eased citizenship requirements: In Kherson and other occupied regions, Ukrainian caregivers could now file for Russian citizenship on behalf of Ukrainian foster children and orphans.
The decree also expedited the process so that children could become Russian citizens in 90 days or less, instead of up to five years.
The next month, Korniyenko, director of the foster home, was summoned to Kherson’s Ministry of Health, now run by the occupation authorities. A Russian-backed official asked her to remain the director, but under his supervision. She was even offered a Russian passport.
But Korniyenko refused. She had had enough of the occupiers, who, she said, intimidated the staff by asking them about their political views in a test of their allegiance and carried guns while monitoring the children.
Lukina resigned, too. She cared deeply about the children, but she didn’t want to have any role in what Russian-backed officials might do to them.
“I didn’t want to take part in it,” she said. “And I was afraid that they would take me away as well.”
In search of a new director, the occupation authorities turned to Dr Tetiana Zavalska, a paediatrician at the foster home who often worked night and weekend shifts. She was sympathetic to the new occupation administration and made clear her pro-Russian views.
Zavalska encouraged the occupation authorities to formally register the foster home as a business under the new Russian-backed administration, in order to confer legitimacy to their control over the Ukrainian home and its children.
It was registered that very month.
That August, the Russian state-run television network RT ran a segment celebrating Kherson’s occupation that featured the foster home, now a legal entity in their eyes. As the host, Anton Krasovsky, approached the home’s entrance, he derided the inscription on a plaque affixed to the wall.
“The writing is still in Ukrainian,” he said, before looking up. “But the flag is ours: Russian. It will always be so.”
Zavalska, the new director, led Krasovsky on a tour of the building, pausing at the dining room, where some of the children sat at tables in their diapers.
“Enjoy your meal,” he said, as the camera panned across blank faces. “Say thank you,” a caregiver told the children. Only two of them appeared to oblige.
Later in the segment, Zavalska sat for an interview and described Ukraine’s president as a “clown.”
“I am putting my hope in Russia,” she added.
Broadcasts such as these, which highlighted Russia’s efforts to absorb Ukrainian children from occupied territories, were a regular feature on local news outlets in Russia.
Lvova-Belova, the children’s rights commissioner, was filmed delivering children who had been taken from facilities in the Donbas region, in eastern Ukraine, to new caregivers. She announced that they had become Russian citizens.
On Telegram, Lvova-Belova said she had fostered a Ukrainian teenager, who then obtained Russian citizenship.
Some experts on the region view these actions as a publicly orchestrated campaign by Russia to justify the invasion and cast Putin as a saviour.
“This is Putin’s version of doing God’s work,” said Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s utter theatre laced with this pseudo-historical view that there’s no such thing as Ukraine.”
As Putin illegally annexed Kherson and three other regions, Ukrainian forces began a military campaign to retake Kherson City.
Russian officials, fearing they might lose their grip, came up with a plan for the children in the foster home. In a private online chat for medical students, health officials in Russian-occupied Crimea recruited volunteers to help move them.
Natalia Kibkalo, a nurse who had worked at the home for 30 years, had just put nearly a dozen children to bed, all sick with Covid-19, when she heard the news: The children would be removed in the morning.
Dismayed, she could not sleep. Instead, she and other caregivers spent the night sewing the children’s names into their jackets and organising bundles of clothes for them.
The next morning, on October 21, she changed diapers and fed the children, following the normal pattern of their days. But she couldn’t stand the thought of helping to send them away and took a taxi home.
“We understood that we couldn’t do anything, that we could not stop it from happening,” Kibkalo said. “I don’t know how I could have lived after seeing that.”
Around 8am, ambulances and white buses marked with the letter Z, a symbol of the Russian invasion, arrived at the foster home.
The group included Kastyukevich, aka Navigator, as well as the Crimean health minister at the time — also a member of Putin’s political party — his deputy, the student volunteers and several administrators from another foster home who would eventually become the children’s new caregivers.
Zavalska gathered the children’s personal legal documents and medical records, preparing case files for each one.
Outside the home, Kastyukevich held one child in his arms and kissed him before passing him on as, one by one, the names of the 46 children were called out. Then they were carried onto the waiting buses and ambulances in their winter coats.
The convoy left the foster home later that morning, traversing the river in a perilous journey over a makeshift pontoon. By evening, they had arrived at their final destination.
The whereabouts of the children were never formally disclosed to Ukrainian officials, they said. But Russian officials left clues on Telegram.
The children were taken to the Crimean capital, Simferopol, and divided between two children’s facilities, including Yolochka, whose staff had previously been investigated for negligence.
Kastyukevich, who arrived with fur booties and mittens for the children, wrote on Telegram that the conditions were “much better than before.”
Russian officials have argued that the removal was an act of humanitarian intervention and legal under their constitution because they annexed Kherson and controlled its population.
“It doesn’t matter who they are and who they were,” said Svetlana Scherbakova, a child services director in Crimea. “The children now have a peaceful sky over their heads.”
But human rights experts say Russia’s national laws do not override international obligations.
While temporarily evacuating children for their safety is permissible during conflict, it must follow strict protocols. Because Russia has not formally tracked the children’s movement or given intermediaries access to the children, the evacuation is a forcible transfer under international humanitarian law, according to Stephen J. Rapp, a former US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice.
“What Russia views as a humanitarian mission is a blatant war crime,” he said.
When Lvova-Belova, the children’s rights commissioner, travelled from Moscow to visit the home in Crimea, she said her office would help place the children with Russian foster families, but only if their birth parents could not be identified in Ukraine.
This was not always true.
At least one set of parents said they learned their children were in Crimea only when Times journalists visited them in Kherson six months later — even though documents showed that Russian officials had their names and address.
Their children, Mykola, who had autism, and Anastasiya Volodin, who had cerebral palsy, were placed in state custody years ago after the couple was deemed unable to care for them. Ukrainian courts had yet to decide on their parental rights, but the couple never imagined that their son and daughter might be taken from Kherson.
“I won’t allow anybody to adopt them,” said their father, Roman Volodin.
In the winter of 2022, the new caregivers, along with Zavalska, the appointed legal guardian, took steps to formally integrate the children in Russian society, even though some of them had birth parents in Ukraine who still had legal rights or who were known to Russian authorities.
First, the caregivers applied for Russian birth certificates for the children — including the Volodin siblings — and translated their names into Russian.
The caregivers also arranged for the children to get Russian social security numbers, saying it was a requirement for the children to receive medical care.
The new documents were inadvertently revealed in a Telegram post by Russian-appointed officials.
Eventually, the children received Russian citizenship, the final step necessary to make them eligible for adoption and permanent placement with Russian families.
Legal experts said the new documents, along with the translation of their names and their new nationalities, revealed an intent by Russian authorities to strip the children of their Ukrainian identity, in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It may also amount to a war crime.
In December 2022, Putin signed yet another decree, allowing caregivers in occupied territories to renounce the Ukrainian citizenship of children in their custody.
Emboldened Russian officials said that there were no plans to repatriate children to Ukraine and that the children would continue to receive the “full support” of the state.
“These children now have Russian documents,” Kastyukevich said in an interview. “Let’s move on.”
The anniversary of the war brought presidential state awards from Putin to the two Crimean officials — the health minister at the time and his deputy — who helped orchestrate the transfer of the children from Kherson.
But the very next day, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and his children’s rights commissioner, accusing them of “unlawfully” taking “at least hundreds of children” from children’s homes across Ukraine.
“There is no suggestion that this was a temporary relocation after which the children would be repatriated,” said Payam Akhavan, a former prosecutor at The Hague.
Neither Putin’s office nor Lvova-Belova’s office responded to multiple requests for comment from the Times. But in public statements, the commissioner pledged to continue her work. At a news conference last year, Putin’s office dismissed the warrants as “petty.” Months later, Putin said there would be no “obstacles” to returning the children — so long as their parents travelled to claim them.
It is unlikely that either official will face trial, but legal experts described the case against them as “bulletproof,” citing the abundance of evidence that can be traced through open-source data.
There is no consensus, though, on how many children were forcibly transferred or deported to Russia, in part because of Ukraine’s decentralized child-care system. Ukraine claims the total number is about 19,500 children, but in interviews, officials in Kyiv, the capital, struggled to break down or verify their data.
It has been 19 months since the children were removed from the foster home. A compilation of their images — from Kherson to Crimea — reveals how much they’ve grown in that time, making them harder to recognise even for their Ukrainian caregivers.
That may also pose a challenge to Ukrainian investigators, who are trying to track and return the children, and who have opened criminal cases against Kastyukevich and Zavalska.
Last August, legal guardianship of the children changed hands yet again, from Zavalska to the Russian-administered Ministry of Labor and Social Policy for the Kherson region.
The appointed minister, Alla Barkhatnova, said there was a “moral, ethical and legal” obligation to find families for them in Russia.
“We have people waiting in line to adopt or become foster parents,” she added.
Weeks later, their photos began to appear on a Russian federal adoption site, amid those of tens of thousands of Russian children. Their profiles, 22 in total, listed them as children from Crimea and made no mention of their birth country, Ukraine.
At least two of the children have been placed with Russian families, according to child services in Crimea.
Seven of the children from Kherson Children’s Home have returned to Ukraine with the assistance of Ukrainian authorities and third-party Qatari mediators. They included Anastasiya and Mykola Volodin, whose mother travelled in February to Moscow to claim them.
Anastasiya later died in a Ukrainian hospital just weeks after her sixth birthday. A doctor attributed her death to an epileptic seizure. Ukrainian authorities have resumed care of Mykola while a court determines whether his parents can be his legal guardians.
For now, the rest of the children from Kherson remain in Russian custody.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Yousur Al-Hlou and Masha Froliak have investigated atrocities committed by Russian forces in Ukraine since 2022. They travelled across southern Ukraine to report this story.
Written by: Yousur Al-Hlou and Masha Froliak
Photographs by: Emile Ducke
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES