'We hugged a long time' Father who rescued his children from Moscow

Yevhen Mezhevyi struggled to hide his anger yesterday when he saw video footage of Vladimir Putin, the man who ordered the Y deportation of his three children, visiting the port city of Mariupol.

The 40-year-old single father from Mariupol is one of thousands of Ukrainian parents whose children have been abducted and transferred to Russia since Putin invaded last year - forced deportations that prompted the international criminal court to issue an arrest warrant for the Russian president on Friday.

"What can I say about him?" Mezhevyi told the Guardian from the Latvian capital Riga, where he now lives. "I wish he'd get a flat tyre. He's nobody to me and half of the world knows what he is."

Mezhevyi's children were taken while he was being held in jail by Russian-backed separatists for 45 days. Unlike many parents who do not know where their children are, Mezhevyi's family was reunited after he risked a cross-border journey to rescue them.

Mezhevyi was working as crane operator in the suburbs of Mariupol when Russia invaded in February 2022.

"The day of the invasion, as soon as we started hearing shells, my first thoughts were of my son, Matvii, 13, and my daughters, Sviatoslava, nine, and Oleksandra, seven," he said. "I took a cab straight home to my children. We spent the next few days moving from one shelter to another, sleeping on inflated mattresses, without water and electricity."

Mariupol was quickly encircled and subjected to a siege described by the Red Cross as "apocalyptic".

"I was going every day to hospital number four, in Mariupol, where I could charge our phones and power banks," Mezhevyi recalled. "Most of the doctors had left. There were just a few nurses and ER doctors. Some volunteers talked me into moving to the hospital's bomb shelter with my children. In exchange, I helped carry the dead bodies. When we ran out of body bags and the morgue reached its capacity, we just piled them up behind the hospital."