Olga Lopatkina paced around her basement in circles like a trapped animal. For more than a week, the Ukrainian mother had heard nothing from her six adopted children stranded in Mariupol, and she was going out of her mind with worry.
ExpandOlga Lopatkina speaks to The Associated press during an interview in a park in Loue, western France, Saturday, July 2, 2022. She told herself every day that the war would end fast. It was the 21st century, after all. Instead, it edged closer.
Russia claims that these children don’t have parents or guardians to look after them, or that they can’t be reached. But the AP found that officials have deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-held territories without consent, lied to them that they weren’t wanted by their parents, used them for propaganda, and given them Russian families and citizenship.
Even where parents are dead, Rapp said, their children must be sheltered, fostered or adopted in Ukraine rather than deported to Russia. It’s very hard to pin down the exact number of Ukrainian children deported to Russia — Ukrainian officials claim nearly 8,000. Russia hasn’t given an overall number, but officials regularly announce the arrival of Ukrainian orphans in Russian military planes.
In August, a post from a senior official at the Moscow Department of Labor and Social Protection thanking the Russian foster families declared: “Our Children...Now they are ours.” Calluses built up on his hands. His skin grew thicker in other ways. When airplanes rumbled overhead, he no longer ran for shelter.
Finally, a local doctor from Mariupol arranged an evacuation to elsewhere in Ukraine. But pro-Russia forces at a checkpoint refused to recognize the children’s documents, photocopies of official papers identifying them and their parents.Timofey’s pleas went nowhere.Instead, the children ended up in a hospital in the Donetsk People’s Republic, or DPR, a separatist Russian-controlled area in Ukraine.
In 2014, after Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, more than 80 children from Luhansk were stopped at checkpoints and abducted. Ukraine sued, and the European Court of Human Rights found the children were taken into Russia “without medical support or the necessary paperwork.” The children were returned to Ukraine before a final decision.
Her grandmother, Svitlana Obedynska, said Kira had become withdrawn and lost interest in everything, and negotiations were “very difficult.” If there are Ukrainian relatives, they can stay in touch, call and perhaps eventually meet, Volkova said. In the meantime, while the war is ongoing, she noted, the children now still have families of a sort.Olga Lopatkina was a teacher of music and the arts who had lived a hard life. Now a middle-aged woman with red and pink streaks in her hair fading to white, she lost her own mother as a teenager. In 2014, when fighting with Russian-backed forces broke out in Donetsk, she also lost a home.
Lopatkina hounded Ukrainian officials, the local governor, social services, anybody who could evacuate her children. In calls, Timofey told his mother he was looking after his younger siblings. She was proud and slightly reassured.Then, on March 1, their connection was lost. She thought her kids were going to be evacuated to Zaporizhzhia, so she and her husband went there, with books of fairy tales and other treats.
She got a job in a garment factory in France and bought furniture, clothes and toys for children who might or might not return. She chose their bedrooms in her small duplex in the northwest, in Loue. She planned celebrations for missed birthdays. The AP couldn’t reach the Ukrainian mother. But the children didn’t hide their resentment of her, described life with her as constrained and made no effort to call her.They said she had dropped them off at a bunker in Mariupol. The Russian military got them out, and they had to choose between adoption by a Russian family and life in a Russian orphanage.
“I’m going to Moscow, I’ve already seen the family and everyone,” she said. “I liked the mom from the very beginning.” The little children repeatedlyasked when they could go home to their mother. They were badly fed, slapped and cursed, Timofey said.
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