The Decibel - How a Ukrainian teen fought to get her brother back from Russia

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, there have been concerns about Ukrainian children, and the efforts by Russia to send them to summer camps or to foster homes within Russia.The Globe’s senior international correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, brings us the story of two siblings separated by this practice and how a sister travelled more than 1,000 km, crossing borders, to try to bring her brother back home.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there have been concerns about Ukrainian children. Russia has taken children away from their homes in Ukraine and put them in summer camps or with foster families within Russia. The Russian government says that this is to keep children away from the front lines of the war. But the International Criminal Court says that it's illegal. The court put out arrest warrants earlier this year for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's Children's Rights Commissioner for forcibly deporting hundreds of Ukrainian children into Russia.

Today, The Globe's senior international correspondent, Mark McKinnon, tells us about two siblings separated by this practice. He managed to speak with a teenager who traveled more than a thousand kilometers to try to bring her brother back home. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mark, thank you so much for being here again. Thank you, Meneka. So I know that you talked to a teenager in Ukraine who was separated from her brother. So can you just start by telling me about this girl and her brother?

Yeah, Ksenia, she's an 18-year-old who at the start of the war, she and her brother were taken away from their mom. Their mom was an alcoholic. And before the war, what were you doing? What was your life like? What is Pochatko's choice? And six months before the war, the Russian invasion

of Ukraine, she and her brother, Sergei, who's 11, were moved in with another family in a border town called Vovchansk. And so they already have quite a bit of trauma, quite a bit of change in their lives. And they're left with this foster family. And they're frankly not getting along very well with this foster family. You know, she describes it not being a very happy place. She said she'd been warned by other foster kids in town that this family was notorious for sort of just taking in extra kids to sort of get more welfare payments from the government and then basically treated kids like servants and got them to do everything around the house.

It was like we were working for her while she was laying there watching television. And then, as you can imagine, on top of all this, there's the Russian invasion of Ukraine and they've quickly fallen to, the town they're in, Vovchansk, quickly comes under Russian occupation. Vovchansk was one of the entry points, so we've seen the war from the moment it started. So they were basically living kind of right on the border between Ukraine and Russia. What was it like for them, Mark, when Russia invaded in February of last year? So Ksenia tells this story about how on the night before the war, and I remember it really well, those sort of last days before February 24th, 2022, everybody was, every night it seemed like

there was a rumor that Russia was going to invade that night, that the Everybody was, every night it seemed like there was a rumor that Russia was going to invade that night, that the war was going to start. And you can imagine it would have been even worse if you're living right on the border. And there were also a lot of people who believed it would never happen. And the night before the invasion began, so it was February the 23rd.

I'm a very intuitive person, and I was going to sleep around 11 p.m. on the 23rd, and a photo frame fell down on the floor. And for me, it was a moment where I felt that something bad was going to happen. And then, you know, while the rest of the country, or most of the rest of the country, places like Kyiv, where I was, or Kharkiv, or Odessa, were awakened by the sounds of explosions and Russian missiles attacking their cities. In Vovchansk, the first thing she heard was the sound of tanks and trucks rolling through the city, which is literally seven or eight kilometers from the Russian border.

And then I woke up in the middle of the night, maybe 3 or 4 a.m., and I heard this heavy sound of trucks driving over the streets. As soon as the war started, really the occupation of Vovchensk started. Okay, so this area was basically taken over almost immediately, it sounds like. But how did things in her hometown change then when that invasion happened? Well, you know, the first, in Vovchensk, like a lot of parts of de-occupied Ukraine, places that are now back under Ukrainian control, you hear the same sort of tales. The first few days, people stayed in their basements.

People were afraid to go outside. They stayed in their shelters. And then after a few days, you know, people had to go outside. They had to buy food, find food. And Vovchansk being in in sort of an occupied place all the shops were closed and it's so close to the russian border that people started going across the border the next town it's actually a city uh much bigger than vovchansk called shebek you know on the russian side and people were would go there and buy food and uh

vovchansk was always a uh it's a russian speaking part of ukraine eastern ukraine so that would have been natural to them to be speaking Russian. But people started, you know, at a shop on the Russian side, they didn't want the Ukrainian currency, the krivna. They wanted Russian rubles. So people started to operate more and more in rubles. And then after a while, they'd lose Ukrainian cell phone service, mobile phone service, they have to go and buy a Russian SIM card.

And to do that, you have to register with the occupation authorities. And so more and more, you just sort of drift into this new reality of being in what they're told is the Russian Federation, even though obviously they were always in Ukraine. Ksenia told me that it was people eventually just sort of started working with the Russian authorities. People became collaborators. People agreed to work with the Russian authorities. Some of them were forced, probably. It's still unclear. But a lot of people started to work for the Russians.

But at some point, it's very difficult to live in an occupied place and not deal with the authorities. And so whether it's accessing social services, whether that's getting your utilities switched on, or if you work for these places, if you work at a hospital or a police station, is it cooperating with the occupation to work and get paid by the government? Or is that just helping your society continue to survive? So let me ask you about Ksenia again here, Mark. I mean, she's living there.

What happens to her in those early months of the war? So she turns 18 very early in the war. And so she's no longer a ward of the state, so to speak. She's no longer able to live in this foster home she'd been in. I turned 18 and my foster mom forced me to go to Shebekino to vocational school. I had nowhere to go and she didn't want me at home because I'd become an adult. So she moves across the border into Russia, into Shebekino and takes up residence at a hairdressing school. And she says to me that, you know, she never wanted to be a hairdresser,

but here was a place that she could sleep and it wasn't far from her brother. And so then what happens to her brother? How do they end up separated? So the next thing that happened, and this is quite a widespread phenomenon that, you know, frankly, you know, even the International Criminal Court is coming, just coming to grips with, and this is, there was a concerted effort to take Ukrainian children and get them to move into Russia. And in some cases, this was just an ordinary family. Imagine you're living in a place like Vovchensk, which the front line was never very far from. And there's constant explosions, because even after it gets taken under Russian occupation, the Ukrainians are now trying to

recapture this area. And they are firing at places like Vovchensk. And so, you know, the offer is, you know, send your kids somewhere safe for the summer. Send them to a summer camp hundreds of kilometers away in Russia. Wouldn't that be better for them? And for a lot of ordinary families, that's a very difficult choice to make. For kids like Sedehyi, who were orphans or fostered, there seems to be even more pressure applied to get these kids to go to these camps, these laggers in Russia.

Ksenia says that she spoke to the foster family and said, please don't do this. I tried to convince our foster mom not to send my brother, but I couldn't. And of course, the idea of sending kids away from the front lines, you know, that's something that is done in war. But it sounds like this is a different kind of situation here. I guess, what do we know about this summer camp, Mark? It would have been, for anybody who grew up in Russia or Ukraine or the former Soviet Union, it would have been very natural to send your kid to one of these summer camps. They were called loggers.

And if that word sounds familiar, it's because, you know, the word gulag comes, the last three letters is an acronym. And the last three letters are the first three letters of logger of a camp, you know, a labor camp. Many, many, many Russian, Ukrainian and Soviet kids went to these camps. And during the Soviet era, they were connected to this idea of being young pioneers and being, you know, kids would, in addition to getting exercise and fresh air, would also be getting a sort of background in how to be a good communist and a bit of Leninism and Marxism mixed in with your football. Young pioneers is kind of like the scouts or the brownies, the girl guys, that kind of thing? Essentially, although obviously with a very different sort of ideological take. For the first 20 something years after the fall of the Soviet Union in Russia and Ukraine, these camps became roughly like they are in the West.

But since the start of the conflict between Russia and the West, since the annexation of Crimea, since the start of the proxy war in Donbass nine years ago, Russia has sort of gone back towards patriotic education camps for kids. And I've seen these videos where kids are dressed up in military uniforms, they're running around with guns, there are fake explosions going off while instead of playing football, they're practicing storming a city. And they really are about building the next generation of sort of loyal Kremlin youth.

And especially for these kids that are being brought from Ukraine, they're being given sort of a political education. That political education is for the Russian perspective on this war, that Ukraine is a fascist state, Ukraine is a failed state. And so the kids that go to these camps, you know, they're very much, the idea is they will come back either feeling like citizens of the Russian Federation or else feeling very suspicious of the Ukrainian state. We'll be back in a minute. So how common is this practice, Mark, of Ukrainian children being taken to Russia? So we have a whole bunch of very different numbers on that one. The Russian government itself says that there are 700,000 Ukrainian children that have crossed the border into Russia since

the greater invasion began since the February 24th, 2022. Now that number, even if that number is accurate, it wouldn't tell you really what's going on because it would be every Ukrainian minor that crossed the border. And I know from my interviews, there's lots of evidence that many would have been fleeing from a place like Mariupol at the start of the war and then maybe going all the way around to latvia lithuania to the baltic states then coming back to ukraine so but they'd be clocked as having gone into russia so this number is kind of doesn't tell us very much the uh save ukraine the ngo which uh helps ghanaians reunite actually uses an even bigger number they say 1.5 million because they're talking about every Ukrainian child who is currently living under occupation in Crimea,

which was taken in 2014, Donetsk, Luhansk, as well as the areas that Russia has taken since the greater invasion started. The International Criminal Court, which has pressed charges against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova Belova, who is the Russian Children's Rights Commissioner, they just say hundreds because they're tracking hundreds of specific cases. Particularly when it comes to orphans and foster kids, there's a real effort to get them to move to Russia, not just to go to camp, but to keep them there and to rehome them. Separately, but related to this, there's a great big demographic crisis in Russia where it's an aging population, the birth rates are very low, and now they've had almost two years of war with a lot of tens of thousands of young men being killed. There's a population deficit in Russia,

and a lot of families willing to take on Ukrainian foster kids with the idea that they're saving these kids from having to grow up in this terrible place next door, which is what almost happened to Sergei. Yeah. And I obviously want to pick up his story soon, too. But I guess I want to you mentioned that the ICC, the International Criminal Court, says that this is a war crime, this practice of taking kids. Why is that? It fits into the broader concept of genocide, frankly, of trying to eliminate a population or drive a population off of its territory of a specific ethnic group. And so by removing children forcibly from a war zone and bringing them to a different country and frankly, sort of inflicting a different culture on them and

trying to change the cultural background of these children. That's part of the greater idea of trying to erase an ethnic group, which many, many Ukrainians believe is what the Russian Federation is really trying to do here. They manipulate children because they have this mission to increase the population of Russia. And the easiest way to do that is by taking children. So what ended up happening with Sergei? We know he went to Russia, he went to one of these summer camps. What ended up happening to him after that? So Sergei goes to this camp in the summer of 2022, so July, August 2022. And then in September, all of a sudden, there's this massive breakthrough where the Ukrainian army had liberated all of Kharkiv region, including Vovchansk. And so you have this situation where Ukrainian forces have recaptured Vovchansk.

It's safe to go, if not back there, maybe back to Kharkiv or back to Kiev. But Ksenia is at school or living at this hairdressing college in Shebekino and Serhii is in Krasnodar at this summer camp. And when the summer camp ends, when the summer ends, Serhii is sent to a new foster family in the same area in the southern Krasnodar region. And so that's the next time that Ksenia makes contact with him. And Ksenia decides, because of the people that she knows in Shebekino, she describes them as zombies. They just believed everything the television told them about what was happening in Ukraine.

She decides that she wants to go back to Ukraine. By that time, I was completely devastated, mentally and physically. I made a firm decision to get back to Ukraine. But I also made a promise to myself that I would only go back with my brother. So Ksenia hears that her brother is now with a foster family in Russia. What does she do with that? So Ksenia at first doesn't know what to do.

And then she meets in Shebekino, she meets another young Ukrainian woman from the Kharkiv region that she'd met previously before the war. And through their conversations, this friend tells her about save ukraine says you know like if you want to get your brother you should get in contact what happens you know it's really quite impressive but she she reaches out to to save ukraine and they put her in contact with a local volunteers somebody who lives in russia but is a volunteer for save ukraine. She somehow gets the phone number of the foster family and speaks to her brother.

She says the first time she calls her brother, he's quite excited to hear from her and quite excited by the idea of going home. And then she starts to sort of move the conversation forward. It was an absolute labyrinth of paperwork. I was told I needed permission to transfer a child. I needed it translated to Russian. I needed to do this and that.

I checked with my brother first, of course, if he wanted to come with me or not. He told me yes, he wanted to go back with me to Ukraine. In subsequent calls, she said it feels like he started the chain. She no longer wants to go home. He starts telling her that he's happier where he is. And at the end, when the decision was made and the documents were almost done, the Foster family started to apply psychological pressure on my brother to change his mind. She hears from him sort of a little bit of what he's getting from the Russian summer camp. She starts to get this message from him that Ukraine is destroyed as a country.

Ukraine is poor. They told him different things from there's a war there to people are homeless in Ukraine and you'll have no future there. Different types of propaganda. And that starts to change Serhii's mind. And then the foster family stops letting her speak to him. So then she makes the decision that I'm going to have to go get him. I'm going to have to go speak to him in person.

So with this volunteer, they drive a thousand kilometers from Shebekino down to Krasnodar province to try and find Sergei. And did she find him? She did. And she says it was the worst moment of this entire ordeal is when she encounters him um and at first it's in the presence of the foster family and a russian social worker and she says like he didn't look happy to see her after all this her little brother looked angry that he that she'd gone through all this to try and find him and he's saying sticking to this line he doesn't want to go home. He's happier where he is.

I wouldn't say he'd been physically tortured, but he looked like an alien person. He wasn't pleased to see me. At this point, you know, Sergei wasn't able to speak about this, about his own experience, his own perspective on all this, for child protection reasons, among others. But, you know, there is a sense sense from kasania that her brother had been changed by this by this experience in a russian summer camp and finally and this is one of the more interesting roles in all this is the russian social worker um says you know allows creates a space for for kasania and her brother to go for a walk and

like they go to buy ice cream together and to speak privately. And in this conversation, she makes a couple of promises. One is she promises her little brother that if he goes back to Ukraine with her, she'll buy him a quad bike. And then... I said that he would just go for a month. And if he doesn't like it, he'll come back to Russia. But I didn't mean it.

The third promise that she makes is that she's never, ever going to let her brother go back there. Yeah. And so did the two of them end up back in Ukraine then? So he, inspired by the idea of getting a quad bike, and if there's any listener out there who wants to provide one, I'll deliver it. There is a, they go on, they drive all day and all night back through this route that we're not going to talk about, but it's a long drive from Krasnodar to get back into Ukraine.

And she said that Sergei slept almost the entire time, which also makes you wondering what kind of experiences he'd been through. They're back in Kiev now. I've realized that the oxygen smells better on this side of the border. He is, the poor kid's now with his third foster family since the start of this war. Ksenia is living nearby in a youth hostel. So they're trying to make a go of it.

She said that when they first got there, Sergei was really mad at her because, you know, while Kiev is safe by day most of the time, it is a place where there are sirens and explosions. And, you know, it is a lot more tense, I imagine, than, you know, an idyllic life in a summer camp in southern Russia. So it's taken him a little while to forgive her and taken her a little while to sort

of convince herself that, yes, that she did the right thing. I guess, yeah, how does she feel about being back in Ukraine with him now? She's done a lot of thinking about how it happened and how the people that she knew involved Chansk allowed themselves to be part of this. People in the occupied areas have no information. I want to help break through this wall and show them how things are in reality. And really interestingly, she decided to go back to school and to try and become a journalist this time, not a hairdresser. But she's decided the problem, the root core problem was the people in Vovchansk who were receiving only sort of Russian propaganda didn't really understand the bigger picture, didn't understand what was happening. They hadn't read about Russia's patriotic reeducation, hadn't thought about the purposes of this Russian military invasion and had allowed themselves to be manipulated.

So she thinks that the real fundamental problem was misinformation and disinformation. And she wants to fight that. Well, it is. Thank you so much. Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you. That's it for today.

I'm Maina Karaman-Wells. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening,

and I'll talk to you tomorrow.