The Russians took their children...These mums went and got them back

Making a nerve-wracking 5000km journey from Ukraine into Russian-occupied territory and back again, a group of mothers managed to recover their children from the custody of Russian authorities

- CARLOTTA GALL AND OLEKSANDR CHUBKO

For weeks after Russian troops forcibly removed Natalya Zhornyk’s teenage son from his school last year, she had no idea where he was or what had happened to him.

Then came a phone call.

“Mum, come and get me,” said her son, Artem, 15. He had remembered his mother’s phone number and borrowed the school director’s mobile phone. Natalya made him a promise: “When the fighting calms down, I will come.”

Artem and a dozen schoolmates had been loaded up by Russian troops and transferred to a school further inside Russian-occupied Ukraine.

While Natalya was relieved to know where he was being held, reaching him would not be easy. They were now on different sides of the front line of a full-blown war, and border crossings from Ukraine into Russian-occupied territory were closed.

But months later, when a neighbour brought back one of her son’s schoolmates, she learnt about a charity that was helping mothers bring their children home.

Since it is now illegal for men of military age to leave Ukraine, Natalya and a group of women assisted by Save Ukraine completed a nerve-racking, 5000km journey through Poland, Belarus and Russia to gain entry to Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine and Crimea to retrieve Artem and 15 other children. Then they had to take another circuitous journey back.

In the 13 months since the invasion, thousands of Ukrainian children have been displaced, moved or forcibly transferred to camps or institutions in Russia or Russian-controlled territory, in what Ukraine and rights advocates have condemned as war crimes.