Some wore full army fatigues. Others wore plain clothes. All had their faces covered. And all wanted one thing: Ukrainian orphans.
Chilling images have emerged from the start of the war of Russian soldiers and secret service members sweeping through an orphanage in Kherson, looking for children to force into Russia. As many as 13,000 have been taken since the war began. But in this case, the 50 or so orphans who normally resided in the building were already safe after its director put them into hiding to avoid abduction.
CCTV footage obtained by Sky News captured the hunt - a rare glimpse at the arbitrary rounding up of minors.
In the clips, agents from the FSB - Russia’s secret service - are seen walking through the building, which is empty, as they confiscate computers and files hoping to locate the children.
Volodymyr Sahaidak, its director, sent the children to live with local families when he learned from pro-Kremlin collaborators of plans to send them to the Russian capital for military training and re-education. He told Sky News: “We saw Russian propagandists saying that they need to take the orphans to give them to military schools, indoctrinate them and let them fight for Russia.
“It was the scariest thing, so we started hiding children because we understood they would take them.”
Ukraine’s intelligence service believes 13,000 children have been kidnapped by Russian forces since the beginning of the war earlier this year.
It has led to allegations of war crimes from Kyiv and its Western allies. The Geneva Convention says it is a crime for a warring party to transfer another country’s children to its own territory unless there are “imperative reasons” to do so. “All necessary steps must be taken to facilitate the return of the children to their families and their country,” it adds.
In occupied Kherson, swathes of which have since been recaptured by Ukraine, Sahaidak said local families sheltered orphans living in his facility. “It seemed that if I did not hide my children they would simply be taken away from me,” he said.
But his efforts did not stop Vladimir Putin’s forces from getting their hands on at least a few children in the region of southern Ukraine. Fifteen children were abducted and taken to mainland Russia before Moscow’s forces were expelled from the region last month.
Oxana, a teacher at the orphanage, said the children were put in military vehicles by soldiers armed with machine guns. Natalya Kadyrova, who lives close to another Kherson orphanage, said she witnessed children as young as three abducted.
The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said at least 48 children aged between three and five were kidnapped from this orphanage.
Similar incidents have been reported in the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol. Ivan Federov, the exiled mayor, earlier this week said Russian forces in his town had plans to kidnap 1500 children under the pretext of a New Year’s celebration.
Kyiv has also accused Moscow of illegal mass deportations from Mariupol, a southern city held by Moscow, of more than 1,000 children. In a national broadcast, Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian governor of the Luhansk region, recently claimed Moscow was abducting children and sending them to Chechnya for “patriotic education”.Last month, Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen warlord, said 200 “difficult teenagers” were “taken” to his region for the “teens of Russia” programme.
The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think-tank, wrote reports on forced deportations under the guise of medical treatment or adoption. As of the summer, Russia was believed to have forcibly deported between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainians, who were mainly women.
During Russia’s retreat from the Kherson region, Moscow’s forces were said to have moved some 60,000 Ukrainians in less than a week away from surrendered areas.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, puts the number of forced deportations in the upper regions of independent experts’ estimations.
In October, Iryna Vereshchuk, his deputy prime minister for the reintegration of the temporarily occupied territories, said the identities of all kidnapped children were known and Kyiv would “demand that Russia brings them back”.
Earlier this year, Britain and Ukraine’s other Western allies targeted the alleged “architect” of Russia’s abduction campaign. Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s children’s right commissioner, was accused by Ukraine of organising the kidnap of at least 2000 children from the Donbas regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Russia has repeatedly denied its role in any alleged deportations. Its ambassador to the UN branded the allegations of kidnap a “new milestone in the disinformation campaign by Western nations”. But Moscow has previously claimed that it has moved children to Russia to protect them from the conflict.