EXPRESS CRUSADE

RETURN THE STOLEN CHILDREN

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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 brain washed 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.