This week, 31 kids who had been separated from their families in Ukraine were reunited with them in Ukraine after a protracted operation.
Children from Kherson and Kharkiv who were “kidnapped” by Russian forces have been reunited with their families. 31 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this week following a protracted operation to bring them back from Russia, according to the humanitarian organization Save Ukraine. During the conflict, the kids had been removed from occupied areas.
Nobody in Russia was looking for the children’s parents in Ukraine
“Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing its completion. It was special regarding the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity,” Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine said.
According to Mykola Kuleba, who added that nobody in Russia was looking for the children’s parents in Ukraine, the children who returned from Russia were “living with rats and cockroaches.”
“There were kids who changed their locations five times in five months, some children say that they were living with rats and cockroaches,” he said.
He said that the kids were transported from the Russian-occupied Kharkiv and Kherson regions of Ukraine to what they called stays in summer camps.
Ukraine reported that roughly 19,500 kids had been abducted to Russia since Moscow invaded in February of last year. While Moscow, which governs a significant portion of Ukraine’s east and south, denied kidnapping children and said that they had been moved away for their own protection, Kyiv has denounced these “illegal deportations.”