Thousands of Ukraine's kids vanished, but one made it back

THE boy from Mariupol still wasn't ready to walk to the bus stop alone, so just before 8am, he and his grand-mother set off for school together.

- LIZZIE JOHNSON, KOSTIANTYN KHUDOV SERHIY MORGUNOV and SERHII KOROLCHUK

He reached for her hand, zipping her fingers in his own, and stole a sip of her coffee.

Illia Matviienko was almost 13 but he still got lost easily. Three years had passed since his mother bled out in his arms after a Russian bombing, since a neighbour chipped her grave in the frozen winter of their yard, since soldiers found him alone and took him deeper into the occupied Donetsk territory where he was put up for adoption.

There, he almost became a different boy: a Russian one. Then his grand-mother, Olena Matviienko, spotted him in a 26-second Russian propaganda video.

Illia became an extraordinary test case for how, and whether, Ukraine could claw back its missing children - a journey that took Matviienko, 64, across four international borders and deep into Russia.

"I wouldn’t have found him if I didn’t see the video," she said at their home in Uzhhorod, in far western Ukraine. “He would be with a differ-ent family now. How much would he remember of who he was?”

Illia’s return in 2022 after weeks in a hospital in occupied Ukraine showed the difficulty of just getting back one child let alone the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children now at the centre of Kyiv’s demands for peace.

Deported or “disappeared” into Russia, their plight has united American politicians to pressure President Donald Trump for their safe return and spurred war crimes charges against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his deputy, children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, for their illegal transfer charges a Kremlin spokesperson disputed as “outrageous and unacceptable”.

During a meeting at the Vatican in Rome Last month, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed directly to Pope Leo XIV, asking for the Church's assistance in bringing the children home. Ukraine wants a full accounting of all the children taken to Russia and their repatriation as part of any peace settlement.