KYIV, Ukraine-Russian-armed soldiers in Blackfa, with gunmen, to the 16-year-old Vladislav Rodinko’s house in Jeresson in southern Ukraine and gave him half an hour to collect some things.
“I was at home on my own. I mobilized my things in a state of panic,” the teenager told NBC News. He described in the morning in October 2022, eight months after the arrest of the Russian forces in the city, when he said that the soldiers forced him to enter a car and expel “in an unknown direction.”
The start of a nightmare was for eight months, as the teenager became part of a systematic effort from Russia to transfer and reunite thousands of children from Ukraine, in some cases they were forcibly adopted while sending others to military training camps.
At a meeting with President Donald Trump and many European leaders at the White House last month, Voludmir Zelinski of Ukraine raised the case of “kidnapped children” in Ukraine. His comments came three days after Trump met his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska for talks about ending the war.
Although the little progress has been made towards the ceasefire since then, McCola Coleba, founder of Save Ukraine, a leading NGO supporting people trying to secure the return of their children from Russia, insisted that “the focus of world leaders should remain on children, not just the land.”
Colba, whose organization says it saved more than 750 children from Russia and Ukrainian provinces that its forces occupy, says that the payment to remove and re -educate them came from the highest levels of Kremlin.
The International Criminal Court accused Putin of the war crime of overseeing the illegal kidnapping and deporting children from Ukraine to Russia, and in March 2023 it issued a memorandum of arrest. The International Criminal Court also accused Maria Alexevana Lavova Bilova, Putin Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, of committing similar crimes.
“They force these children to be Russian, and to be Russian soldiers,” Colba He said in a telephone interview last month, adding: “The Russian system has a clear intention to exterminate the Ukrainian identity.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense and the Lvova-Belova office immediately did not respond to requests to comment on both Vlad’s kidnapping and articles of arrest of the International Criminal Court.
Vlad said that he was transferred to two camps in the Crimea, the Black Sea Peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine and was stars in 2014, then to a naval academy in the Putin forces operating.
“They tried to break me in every possible way,” he said, adding that he was treated “very badly” and deprived food in the first camp because “the position of pro -dealers’ positions began to appear.”
On one occasion, he said that he “dropped the Russian flag and hung my inner clothes there.” He said that this led to his threat in solitary confinement for a week, adding that his kidnappers “fed me twice a day, they did not allow me to communicate with anyone at all.”
He said that the chief of security in one of the camps had tore the girl’s shirt and dominated because he carries an arms coat in Ukraine.
In regular chapters with other Ukrainian children between the ages of 6 and 18, he said: “We have learned everything about Russia only, the history of Russia and so on,” adding that they also talked about the recent events in the war, such as the arrest of Ukrainian lands.
He said: “I understood that Russia is a moderate country and I took my childhood and cut off my contacts with my family so that I could not see it.”
Vlad said that on the morning of his arrest, he managed to summon his mother, Tatiana, 38, To tell her that he was kidnapped.
Tatiana said that she was not at home when he was transferred because she was transferred to the Russian leader’s office to write a statement about her mother, Rodenko Tamara, 53, Who died in an attack the day before. They wanted to say, “Ukraine killed my mother.”
On the call, Tatiana said, Vlad told her that he was in the city of Olski and was “to the island of Crimea to rest”, which left it puzzled. “At that moment, we were subjected to some fighting,” she added. Simply told him, “How can you leave your family at this difficult time? “I didn’t know any details.”
Along with other parents, I only realized that Russian soldiers were training children to say they were being evacuated from the bombing and sent to the summer camps.
With the intense fighting in Jesson, even after the Russian forces were expelled from the city in November 2022, Tatiana said that in the month of the kidnapping, she decided to move west to the city of Micoles.
Along with her husband, Olexander, 43, who is also the wife of Vlad’s husband, she left the city with her other five children, including the child Stephania, who was less than a year old at the time. NBC News agreed not to use Olksander’s last name as it was called to the Ukraine Army in February 2023 and is still working. Her sister and cousin joined their way west of Micoles.
Although Vlad’s phone was routinely examined by his Russian captors, she was able to stay in contact with her son through cross text messages, but she “told him not to create problems.”
“I said when you can, if you are there alone or no one accompanying you, then write,” she said, adding that she was able to prove that he was being held in a camp in Lazorn in southeast Ukraine.
Tatiana said, after a friend told her about saving Ukraine, she contacted the organization, which she arranged after several months of planning her to travel to Russia with six other women whose children were taken.
With no direct road across the front lines, Tatiana said, she traveled through Poland, Belarusia and Russia Russia, Moscow, before she was able to finally travel to the camp via the Crimea.
She said that no one from Ukraine was accompanied by the group, but its representatives were in contact with the phone and its rank to be placed by a volunteer in a temporary house.
Although it was almost searched by masked men upon their arrival, Tatiana was initially fine. But on the second day, agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the KGB spy agency, said, and put a mask on her head and took her somewhere to interrogate, after “confiscating my documents and my phone.”
She said, “They have interrogated, maybe six or seven hours,” she said, adding that she was closed in a dungeon on the basement overnight before interrogating it the next morning. She said that her investigators were especially interested in saving Ukraine.
They also brought a photographer and journalist, she told her that she expects to say, “How great Russia is, how help us and the bad Ukraine for us.”
While she was initially hesitant, she was able to use Vlad to consult with Ukraine’s conservation via a text message. Tatiana said the group told her: “Do what is necessary, just to leave from there.”
FSB did not immediately respond to the comment.
After an interview on the camera, she said, she was released with Vlad and she was allowed to make an arduous trip to the house.
Tatiana said, “It was just happiness after terror … I was simply surprised,” Tatiana said.
Children who are kidnapped are now spread over nearly 200 sites from the Black Sea to the Pacific Coast in Russia, according to Nathaniel Raymond, CEO of the Humanitarian Research Laboratory at Yale College of Public Health (HRL), who is the pioneer in the abstract Ukrainian body.
The group watched the movement of children by analyzing satellite images and photographing aircraft and vehicles that appear to be used to transport children, among other techniques.
“Not all come from the same place. Not all go to the same place. They don’t have the same purpose.”
Cindysi Lindsay Graham, RS.C, and Richard Blumentel, D-Kon, have introduced the possibility of submitting a draft law in the Senate, if approved, could appoint Russia and Plasia as a state sponsor of terrorism to kidnap Ukrainian children, a source familiar with NBC News said in the middle of their ages. The draft law says that Belarus “directly supported the kidnapping of Ukrainian children and supported their transfer.”
But Save Ukraine and HRL achieved financial success last spring after the Trump administration reduced their programs.
Experts say Russia is pushing to control more Ukrainian lands, and saving Ukrainian children has become a more urgent issue.
“This is an additional reason to get all the children we can return before closing the door,” said Raymond.
“Now is the decisive moment that America cannot allow itself to decline,” added Colba, who saved Ukraine.
As for Lavad, who is now 19 years old, he said that thinking about his family kept him during his time in captivity, and rushed to see his little sister Stephania once he arrived at home.
Now in the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, he hopes to become a sports coach.
“What helped me all the time is that I have a family in Ukraine,” he said. “I can return to Ukraine and build an ordinary future.
Darna Maer mentioned from Kyiv and Dehghanpries Dehghanpisah Freez New York.