STATE-SPONSORED CHILD ABDUCTION

EXCLUSIVE: Ukrainian children are being kidnapped and brainwashed by Russia... before being sent to war, to kill their own countrymen. As the Express launches a major new campaign, investigations editor ZAK GARNER-PURKIS reports on the devastation faced by divided families.

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FARMER Volodymr Sanin began to worry about the isolation of his village when Russian soldiers took an interest in his 16-year-old adopted son. “From the first days of the war, we were cut off from the whole of Ukraine,” he explains. “The Russians occupied the territory and cut off lines of communication. There were no connections, no delivery to grocery stores and it was impossible to withdraw funds at ATMs.”

What might spark a violent reaction from the occupying forces that had rolled into his community in the Ukraine’s Kharkiv Oblast region was unclear.

But, so far, the policy of avoidance adopted by the family had been effective. “We did not let our children go anywhere so as not to attract attention,” he adds. “We were afraid our adopted kids would be taken away because they would say we have no rights to them under Russian law.”

But keeping teenagers inside at all times is not easy and, eventually, it became impossible to stop his son from heading into the village to meet friends.

Speaking to the Express for the launch of our major new campaign, Return The Stolen Children, Volodymr continues: “He’d go to the centre, where there is a little field and play football. He gradually started acting differently and told me he had ‘new friends’. One day, he went out and didn’t come back all night.”

By the time his son came home one evening drunk and smelling of cigarettes, Volodymr, 56, a father of 16 adopted and two biological children, and his wife Halyna, 57, realised he was being groomed by the Russian soldiers.

“I began to think he was being brainwashed and we couldn’t do anything,” he explains. “The Russian soldiers were giving him alcohol and we were worried if we upset my son he might say something about the location of his brother who’s in the Ukrainian army.”

Having previously spoken harshly about Russia, the teenager's insults about Vladimir Putin’s despotic regime abruptly stopped.