Thousands of children from Ukraine were told they were going on a school trip before unknowingly being sent to Russian “re-education” camps.
When Russians poured into Ukrainian towns, teachers were instructed to give consent forms to parents and told them to bring their children to a specific destination the next day before they were whisked away to so-called school camps.
A report by Yale University last month said more than 6,000 children aged between four months and 17 years were being held in 43 camps in a systematic campaign “coordinated by Russia’s federal government”.
More than two-thirds of the facilities, they said, were engaged in “re-education”, which is the means of turning them into Russian loyalists.
Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine’s commissioner for children’s rights, told the Sunday Times they believe the true toll to be higher.
She said: “Russians say they have 738,000 Ukrainian kids they evacuated — but it’s not an evacuation, it’s abduction and brainwashing and it’s an act of genocide.
“We don’t believe it’s as many as that — we have so far documented 16,221 — but I think it’s a few hundred thousand,” she says. “It’s all part of their Russification campaign.”
According to Herasymchuk, the Russians use five methods to get the kids to the camps. One, kill the parents and take the children; two, take them directly from parents; three, separate parents and children in so-called filtration camps; four, trick them by sending children to sports or health camps; or kidnapping them from special schools, boarding schools and orphanages.
The Yale report found that the actions could constitute war crimes.
Tatiana Vlaiko told the Sunday Times that on one of the few times she spoke with her daughter from one of the camps, the 11-year-old mentioned that everything was in Russian and they had to sing the Russian anthem every morning.
And then, instead of coming home after two weeks, Vlaiko was told her daughter had been moved from that camp to another.
“I called her teacher, asking what is happening, will you bring them back? But she stopped answering", Ms Vlaiko said.
Russian authorities sought to provide a pro-Moscow viewpoint to children through lessons as well as through field trips to patriotic sites and talks from veterans, the report found.
Children were also given training in firearms, but one Yale researcher said there was no evidence they were being sent back to fight.
US state department spokesperson Ned Price said the report “details Russia’s systematic, government-wide efforts to permanently relocate thousands of Ukraine’s children to areas under Russian government control via a network of 43 camps and other facilities.
“In many cases, Russia purported to temporarily evacuate children from Ukraine under the guise of a free summer camp, only to later refuse to return the children and to cut off all contact with their families.”
Only 307 children have so far been retrieved, according to Herasymchuk and some children have been in prisoner-of-war swaps.
Inessa Vertash, 43, from Beryslav, 55 miles east of Kherson, last saw her middle son Vitaliy, 15, five months ago.
She told the Sunday Times: “He called me, crying, saying it’s not a camp for kids, it’s like a prison. There were no sheets on the beds, they were made to wear clothes of old people, given food only fit for pigs and beaten if they didn’t sing the Russian anthem.”
Last week, a group of children, who many say were abducted by Russia from the streets of bombed-out Mariupol, were paraded on stage inside Moscow's Luzhniki stadium for a pro-war celebration.
Survivors from Mariupol were disgusted as children, visibly brainwashed, thanked the so-called rescuers at the lavish Moscow celebration.
The mass abductions are being investigated by Karim Khan, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. He said to the Sunday Times: "I’ve never seen anything like this."
He said Islamic State militants snatched Yazidi girls for sex slaves and Pol Pot in Cambodia forced urban families into the countryside, but this feels different because it is the next generation.
