The Daily - Why Russia Is Taking Thousands of Ukrainian Children

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

As Russian troops pushed into Ukraine, children who were fleeing newly occupied territories were swept up. Many became part of a Russian effort to portray itself as a charitable savior. The children were placed in Russian families and paraded on television. The Times interviewed one child who was taken from Ukraine, a girl named Anya, who said she ached to return.Guest: Emma Bubola, a reporter for The New York Times based in London.Background reading: Using adoptions, Russia has turned Ukrainian children into spoils of war.The mayor of a Ukrainian city disappeared, but questions about his loyalty did not.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. As Vladimir Putin makes his case for the war in Ukraine to the Russian people, he's using an unexpected tool, Ukrainian children. Ukraine says thousands of them, mostly orphans, have been relocated to Russia, where they're placed in Russian families and paraded on Russian television. Today, my colleague Emma Bubula tells the story of one of those children. It's Friday, March 3rd. So, Emma, usually when we talk about the war in Ukraine, we talk about battles and weapons and military strategy.

But you've been reporting on a very different kind of campaign by Russia. And this campaign involves children. Tell me about this reporting. Yeah, so I was covering the news about Ukraine last summer, and I started seeing these pretty shocking allegations by Ukrainian authorities that Russia was taking Ukrainian children without their parents to Russia and sometimes placing them in Russian families and giving them up for adoption. And Emma, to be clear, the accusations were that Russian soldiers were taking Ukrainian children back to Russia? No, at that time, the accusations were really vague. So it was Russia is taking Ukrainian children, but we did not know exactly where they were taking them to, where they were taking them from, how they were being taken and who was taking them. And that's what I wanted to figure out,

to, you know, identify at least some cases to report if this was happening and how. And when you started looking into it, what were you seeing? So, Sabrina, it looked like there was a pattern of systematic removal of Ukrainian children, many from group homes that are very common in Ukraine, orphanages or institutions that care for children who are not necessarily orphans. And they were relocating them to Russia with the plan to give them Russian citizenship and placing them in Russian families. And Ukrainian authorities say that while the majority of these children who have been

forcibly taken to Russia were orphans, There were many who were also taken from their parents, separated from their parents at filtration points or who have like relatives or like family who would be ready to take them back in Ukraine. So essentially not all of these children were necessarily abandoned. In some cases, Ukraine is actually saying Russia separated them from their parents. Yes, they're saying that in some cases, their parents were imprisoned and the children were taken to Russia.

Wow. What's the scale? How many children are we talking about? Yes, so from the beginning, it seemed like a pretty serious problem because both Russia and Ukraine kind of did not deny that it was at least a thousand children, probably many more. But Ukraine says that Russia has taken 16,000 children. Oh, wow. That's a lot of children. Yeah. This is just the number that Ukraine has been able to verify. You know, they know exactly the name of these children, where they were from, where they are. And they say these children are mostly orphans. So Russia says it's at least 1,000. Ukraine says it's more like 16,000.

So at the very least, we can say this is thousands of children. Yeah, but I wanted to understand what was the actual experience of one of these children because, you know, Russians, they agreed that this was happening and on a big scale, but they were portraying what was happening in very different ways. So to Ukraine, these were stolen, kidnapped children. And to Russia, these were rescued children. So I wanted to speak to one child and to understand what was their actual experience of this. Interesting, because both sides essentially kind of did not disagree that this was a big thing that was going on.

But they totally disagreed about what it was that was going on, but they totally disagreed about what it was that was going on. Yeah, exactly. So I started reaching out to children what had some experience with this transfer to Russian-controlled areas. And as I interviewed them, many of them seemed to point me in the direction of one girl who was still in Russia, of them seemed to point me in the direction of one girl who was still in Russia, Anya. And with my colleague, Alina Lobzina, from the Moscow Bureau, we managed to find Anya on social media. And slowly, over weeks, she told us her story. Tell me about Anya.

So Anya is a 14, now 15-year-old girl. And to reconstruct Anya's story, we spoke to her Ukraine who, some months before the war started, was actually flagged to Ukraine social services as living in a family in which parents avoided fulfilling parental responsibilities. And what does that mean? According to court documents, they describe her house as being unfit to welcome children. Her mother was disabled and she was out of work. So they moved her to this sanatorium. This is something that is very common in Ukraine.

So before the war, more than 90,000 children were living in institutions. This is a heritage from the Soviet era in which there was a kind of idea that like the state can care for the children of families who cannot afford to care for them. Or if the child is disabled or has other issues, the state can care for them better than their family. And so Anya was among those 90,000 Ukrainian children who were wards of the state or were living in institutions for some other reason. Yeah, so Anya was living in a group home in the city of Mariupol. And so children who were with her in this group home described her as a shy girl with a passion for drawing and for reading fairy tales, with a passion for drawing and for reading fairy tales,

either by herself or to a younger child that she was kind of being like an older sister for. And she was like really caring with her and affectionate. So what happens to Anya when the war breaks out? I mean, we know that Mariupol was just pummeled by Russian forces. pummeled by Russian forces. Yeah, so some children manage to reconnect with their parents and leave this group home in Mariupol. But Ania, who had had sporadic contact with her mother, does not manage to make contact with her or get picked up by her.

So together with about 16 other children, she hides in the basement of this group home. And that actually turns out to be a smart idea because shells fall near some of the buildings of this group home. And after some days of hiding, some days of hiding, one volunteer from Mariupol finds the children in this group home and decides to evacuate them, to bring them away because it was extremely dangerous at the time. And so he puts them on an ambulance and wants to take them to Zaporizhia. It's another city in Ukraine that was considered safer then. But as they head out of the city, they get stopped at a checkpoint because Mariupol was already under Russian siege.

And they're not let through. So as the children wait for a decision to be made about what's going to happen to them, everyone whom I spoke to who was there described the group of pro-Russian officials storming in and kind of deciding that these children are going to go into Russian-controlled territory instead of going to a safer part of Ukraine. Wow. And Anya and the other children were put on a bus,

headed deeper into Russian-controlled territory. So these kids were in a vehicle headed toward Ukrainian territory, were actually taken out of that vehicle and put on a bus headed to Russian territory. Yes, exactly. From there, Anya is taken to Russia. So Anya told us that no one really asked her if she wanted to go to Russia. And she called a friend and she cried because she didn't want to be there. So first, she spent some time in some camps or rehabilitation facilities as they call them

and then she gets moved into a foster family. And what was that foster home like? Yeah so in her foster home there are six more children, four dogs. Anya shares a room with two boys which she says is fun and not scary because she says she's often scared to be alone. She calls her foster parents aunt and uncle. She said they treat her nicely. They do crafts together. They go to parks, walk the dogs in the evenings. But when we spoke to her last fall, she still very much wanted to go back to her home and be reunited with her family. So on the one hand, Anya has been forced to go to Russia, a place she didn't want to go in the first place. But on the other hand, it's a less dire and desperate picture that I was imagining.

She likes her foster family. Yeah. I mean, they're not bringing children to like prison camps, you know, they are very much placing them into families. And many times these families are very well-meaning, you know, they have a mix of patriotism and love for these children. And does she go to school? Yes. So at the same time, she told us that she went to school and that she had these classes that are basically patriotism classes called conversations about important things that were recently introduced in Russia. And they, you know, they're given in these classes, they teach topics like the geopolitical situation or like traditional values. It's basically to teach children how to be proud of Russia. The geopolitical situation as in the war in Ukraine? Yeah, they do talk about the war and they are given virtual tours of Crimea, for example.

And what do they tell her about the war in Ukraine? of Crimea, for example. And what do they tell her about the war in Ukraine? So we don't know this from Anya because it was really hard to get information from her about these classes. But what we do know is that when she was at one of these centers where she was staying in Russia before she

went into the family, she told us the teachers knew more than I do about Ukraine. They tell me that Ukraine is really bad, that she said, I don't believe it. For me, Ukraine will always be good. So they're really trying to teach her that her own country is a bad place and she should be glad she's in Russia. Yeah, for sure. I think the purpose is to integrate her completely into Russian society. And I mean, the maybe strongest evidence of that

is the fact that she was given Russian citizenship. So she has a Russian passport now. So she was given Russian citizenship. Is that unusual? Yeah, there is like a clear intention by Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, to give citizenship to orphans from Ukraine. And he did a decree to streamline this procedure in May. And so, you know, this is just another indication of how systematic Russia wants this Russification of Ukrainian children to be. So it's not just Anya, it's all of these other children, and it's directed by Putin himself. But why is Russia doing this? Like, what's in it for them? I think a lot of the answer to this question might be in the way that Russia is not hiding the transfer of, you know,

at least like more than a thousand children from Ukraine, that kind of shows that Russia is using these children as part of a propaganda campaign to portray Russia as saviors of Ukrainian children and of Ukraine. We'll be right back. So, Emma, before the break, you were telling me that there had been thousands of Ukrainian children taken to Russian territory and that this act by Russia was largely for propaganda purposes. You said that they were trying to frame their war as a humanitarian mission. Who exactly is Russia talking to here and what is it trying to sell? Hmm. So this relocation of Ukrainian children fits really nicely into a propaganda

targeted at domestic audience in Russia because this war is premised on the idea that Ukraine doesn't really exist and that Ukraine is just a part of Russia, that Ukrainian identity isn't real, and that, you know, all Russia is doing is correcting a historical mistake by making Ukraine a part of Russia again. So the message is that these children are Russian and going back to where they belong. So this is something that Putin has been arguing all along, right? That, you know, essentially, there is no Ukraine, that it's just Russia, and that it has these strange habits, but it really is Russia and belongs to Russia.

Yeah, I spoke to a mother who, you know, told me that she took into her family four children from Ukraine. And she told me we're not taking anything that is not ours. And, you know, she even likened what her family did to what Russia is doing, because Russia annexed four territories and our family took in four children. So it's there is really like a parallel between this like broader idea of a war in which, you know, often they were not torn from perfect families. Many of them were orphans or living in state-run facilities before the war. So, you know, they have even like a stronger case arguing that Russia is giving a family and a loving family to children who would otherwise have none. So then Russia really is using these kids to make an argument to the Russian people about why their war is just and right.

What forms does that take? Like, what are they saying exactly and where are they saying it? Yes, there is an abundance of videos and articles and state media that you know, show how the children are arriving to Russia and placing Russian families. So often these children

arrive by train or by airplane and are received by TV cameras. They're given teddy bears. You know, interviewed, saying how happy they are to be in a Russian family. And, you know, they even did a series of documentaries that was widely circulated. Especially in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine, that documentaries about the kids. Yeah, it's a series of videos about, like, several kids were taken into Russian families. You know, they describe kind of like their daily life and how, again, happy they are to be in a Russian family. And in this video, there is like a lot of emphasis on the trauma that these children have been through.

And, for example, there is in one of these videos, some foster parents or adoptive parents take these children from Ukraine to... It looks like a war simulation, like a playful war simulation. But the children get really scared. The video shows the children crying and it projects black and white images of war and destruction to advocate maybe what these children might be thinking about. And the Russian parent promptly comforts them. Remember when we saw them celebrating on their birthday? It was like fireworks.

So, you know, it kind of feels like they want to emphasize the fact that Russian families are finally providing a safe, comfortable environment to these children. If they sing, then the children are at home. They already feel that they are free. a safe, comfortable environment to these children. I think that, you know, Russia kind of, like, forgets to say that while helping these children, like, a few months before, like, in the case of Anya, it was bombing the homes where they were staying. I mean, it's just very deeply cynical use of these children. One of the, I think, most egregious examples is this Russian official who has coordinated this relocation effort by Russia.

And she herself adopted a child from Mariupol. And she talks about him a lot on state media. And she detailed how this child in the beginning was, you know, talking about the fact that he went to pro-Ukraine protest and how like in the beginning he was like sitting alone like missing his home he grew up his friends from Mariupol but then how like with time he came to appreciate his new home in Russia and in in July when the first batch of Ukrainian children obtained Russian citizenship in the Moscow region you You know, and officials posed in these photo ops with them, the Russian official, an official statement. She said, you know, I didn't recognize these kids

from when we traveled in April on the train. Now they're our little fellow citizens. It just seems like fundamentally it's bringing the whole mythology and thrust of the war and why Putin started it full circle, right? Ukraine isn't a place that exists at all. Ukrainians don't exist. They're actually Russians. And look what we have here. We have a bunch of little Russians. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's quite interesting how she herself kind of illustrates what Russia wants to do with these children, which is, you know, basically like cut them off from their original nation and just turn them into Russian citizens.

And actually, that's something that Ukrainian officials consider as a way in which Russia can make it even harder for them to claim them back because, you know, they're saying, oh, they're Russian now. Like, why are you asking for them? Why are you trying to get them back? So given that many of these children didn't have guardians when they were taken to Russia, it probably complicates the effort to have them return to Ukraine, right? So I guess, you know, I'm wondering, what are the Ukrainians doing to get these kids back? It really depends. The Ukrainian authorities are urging parents, guardians, family members to

show up and to make appeals because to start this process to return children, like it usually starts from an appeal from like a family member or like someone who's looking for this child. So, you know, children who don't have anyone, of course, it's much harder to return them because no one is actively looking for them. And how many kids are in that category? I mean, who have a parent or a guardian step forward and claim them? I mean, who have a parent or a guardian step forward and claim them? I don't know in total how many, you know, have parents looking for them or guardians. But like what we know is that 300 children have already been returned out of a total of 16,000 that Ukrainian authorities have identified. So this number is very small. is very small.

So, Emma, stepping back here, I mean, these were children, for the most part, like Anya, who were taken from group homes and orphanages and placed in families in Russia. And, you know, yes, they're being fed this Russian propaganda about their own native-born country and about Russia. But it seems like, you know, just to play devil's advocate here for a second, they're in potentially better and safer environments than they were before, even if it's not necessarily what they themselves would have chosen.

Yeah. What do you make of that? Yeah, I think it's very complicated. And, you know, we did speak to a child who was happy to be in Russia. But I think, yeah, I think it's really not for me or for Russia to decide what's better for Ukrainian children. You know, the fact that some of these children might be placed in nice families is not a justification to remove masses of children from

a national group to another and have them change nationality, you know, erase their heritage, grow up in a country that in some cases has bombed the homes in which they were living. So, and adding to that, I think that we actually don't know much about the family principles of child protections in situations of war. Emma, is this a war crime? States recently said that, you know, this unlawful transfer of children is a breach of the Geneva Convention and constitutes a war crime. And in general, more widely, the international community has really condemned this practice. And this Russian official who has been coordinating, organizing these transfers, was put on the sanctions list of several Western countries. But, you know, prosecuting war crimes is really hard. It takes a lot of time. And in

the meantime, you know, these children might grow up. And for now, you know, Stephen Rapp, the former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes, told me that for now, there is not much that Ukraine can do to legally compel Russia to return these children. And what about Anya? What's happened to her? Does her mother know where she is? Yeah, so Anya's situation is very different and very difficult. So I was able to connect with her mother last fall

and she had no idea that Anya was in Russia. And even after I told her, she still couldn't really believe it. Also, Anya's mom is out of work. She doesn't really have internet at home. And for her, just fathoming a trip to Russia to get her back would be like going to the moon but despite this you know in the meantime Anya's mom was also officially deprived of parental right meaning that the government has you know taken away her custody so I mean I think you know she doesn't have even much of a claim at this point. So yeah, it looks like the odds of her returning are not very high right now.

Emma, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. In an unexpected meeting on Thursday at the Group of 20 conference in New Delhi, Secretary of State Antony Blinken confronted his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and demanded that Russia end its war against Ukraine. It was the first private face-to-face exchange between a U.S. cabinet member and a top Russian official since the invasion last year. The meeting happened at Blinken's request, suggesting that the Biden administration wants to keep lines of communication open with Russia.

It came as the White House prepares to announce another round of military aid for Ukraine when President Biden meets with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Friday. And The defendant will rise. The state versus Richard Alexander Murdoch, defendant. Indictment for murder. Guilty. Verdict. Alex Murdoch, the fourth-generation lawyer whose family long exerted influence in small-town South Carolina courtrooms,

was convicted on Thursday of murdering his wife and his son. The verdict sealed the dramatic downfall of a man who had substantial wealth and powerful connections, but who lived a secret life in which he stole millions of dollars from clients and colleagues and lied to many of those closest to him.

The guilty verdict in Walterboro, South Carolina followed a closely watched trial that lasted nearly six weeks and came more than 20 months after the June 2021 fatal shootings of Murdaugh's wife, Maggie, and their younger son, Paul. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson with help from Moosh Zady. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly.

The Daily is made by Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Lee Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Mark George, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis-Lynn, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Michael Benoit, Liz O'Balin, Astha Chaturvedi, Rochelle Banja, Diana Nguyen, Marian Lozano, Corey Schreppel, Anita Batajou, Rob Zipko, Alicia Baitube, Muj Zaydi, Patricia Willans, Rowan Niemisto, Jodi Becker, Thank you. Alex Stern, Dan Farrell, Sophia Landman, Shannon Lin, and Diane Wong. Special thanks to Sam Dolnik, Paula Schumann, Lisa Tobin, Larissa Anderson, Julia Simon, Sophia Milan, Mahima Jablani, Des Ibequa, Elizabeth Davis-Moore, Jeffrey Miranda, Renan Borelli, Maddie Messiello, and Isabella Anderson. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you on Monday.