In the three years of Putin’s bloody war against Ukraine, one of the most shocking statistics to emerge is that as many as 150,000 children may have been abducted by Russia.
As the world’s attention turns to Donald Trump raging against Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House and hopes of peace talks evaporate, the loss of loved ones is still the daily reality for the Ukrainian people.
Among the missing are orphans whose parents have been killed in the conflict and then separated from their remaining relatives. Thousands of others have been taken from orphanages that fell into Russian hands. Most of the children have been spirited away to unknown locations in Russia, often thousands of miles from their homes, where they are indoctrinated to despise Ukraine.
Attempts to retrieve the children by family members have, overwhelmingly, proved fruitless. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has labelled the deportations as a war crime and issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, his “commissioner for children's rights”, in March 2023.
But there are those trying to help rescue the children and return them to their homeland, including hacker groups using Ukraine’s technological expertise to do it.
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The Independent has spoken to Maksym Dudchenko, the co-founder of one of the most active such groups, called Kiborg. Dudchenko, a 21-year-old student based in Ukraine’s eastern city of Kharkiv, said that he and others who started Kiborg in the summer of 2022 were prompted by a desire to help trace the abducted children.
The group is named after Ukrainian soldiers who became legendary as they defended Donetsk Airport for a year against overwhelming enemy forces after Putin launched the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Because they refused to surrender, the Russians dubbed them “kiborgi” – “cyborgs”, a nickname the defenders were happy to apply to themselves.
Dudchenko explained that one of the group became an expert in exposing the activities of Russia’s “shadow fleet”, which illegally exports shiploads of stolen grain and other agricultural products from Ukraine. He mentored Dudchenko in “hacktivism” and inspired him to co-found Kiborg.
“I think I learned quickly,” he said. “I and my colleagues were able to hack large amounts of data. I was driven, in part, by the desire to find out something others did not know about; to discover something unique and not to just grind out something that had already been covered several times but to find something that would impact on the situation, might even change the world.”
Dudchenko said Kiborg hacked into archives of quisling governments established by Moscow in the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions in 2014, during Putin’s initial grab of Ukrainian territory, and in puppet authorities of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions occupied in 2022.
The hacks remained undetected for some time, said Dudchenko, enabling Kiborg to access huge stores of data. Much of that dealt with deported children and in its first big success, the group identified exactly where 160 of the children now lived and who with.
Kiborg has continued its work concerning the snatched children, tracing not only their whereabouts but also the identities of Russian officials and Ukrainian collaborators responsible for overseeing the deportation process.
Dudchenko said that Kiborg shares its information with Ukrainian government agencies, including its SBU intelligence and HUR military intelligence agencies dealing with Russian crimes and international justice, and human rights bodies such as the ICC and UN.
The hackers broadened their searches to uncover the identities of Russian officials and secret police agents deployed to bolster Moscow’s grip on the occupied territories.
Kiborg has handed over the names, photographs and Russian home addresses of hundreds of such Russian officials, many of whom are accused of committing murder, torture and rape.
Dudchenko said the group had also identified “thousands” of Ukrainian collaborators in the occupied zones and provided the details to the Ukrainian authorities.
Dudchenko says Kiborg knows that large portions of the huge dumps of information, often comprising many terabytes, does not seem to have an immediate value and, in any case, requires time-consuming sifting through using sophisticated specialist computer programmes, some now enhanced with Artificial Intelligence.
Kiborg and similar groups hope that the information they dig up will eventually be used for investigations into Russian war crimes and to fill in blanks and help assemble an accurate record of Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.
Dudchenko says that Kiborg differs from other “hacktivists” because they make their data available as resources to Ukrainian and foreign journalists.
In turn, hacked data about child deportations led Kiborg to investigate a Russian organisation called “YunArmiya” – an abbreviation for “youth army” – which prepares schoolchildren, starting from pre-teen years, for military service by indoctrinating them with the Kremlin’s version of history, training them to use weapons and accustoming them to life in uniform.
YunArmiya began under Putin’s patronage in Russia but has set up branches in occupied parts of Ukraine. Kiborg has obtained and publicised details about Ukrainian children inducted into the YunArmiya system. Dudchenko said that some of those from areas in thrall to Moscow since 2014 had been conscripted into Russian forces and had fought and died fighting against troops from the country of their birth.
Dudchenko explained that data has provided Ukrainian intelligence agencies with a wealth of information to trace the home addresses and cars of senior Russian military officials, politicians, Ukrainian collaborators and others playing a prominent part in Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine.
Ukrainian intelligence has thanked Kiborg multiple times for their information and Dudchenko knows their agents have carried out assassinations in occupied territory and inside Russia itself. But he says Kiborg has never been told if its data has led to this happening directly.
“Obviously, I am not informed of anything like that,” he said. “But, thanks to our information, our defence forces, our special services, can use these databases to find information about our enemies.”
