Inessa Vertashmother of four childrenHe couldn’t say no. When the summer sun was already beating down on Berislav, a medium-sized town along the Dnieper River, 80 kilometers from Kherson, in southwestern Ukraine, she was informed by the computer science teacher at the school number 45became, after the arrival of the Russian troops, the new director of the center, which her son Vitali 16 years old two weeks in a summer camp in the occupied Crimea. “They didn’t care if I agreed or not; the documents were ready and they demanded that we come the next day, at five in the morning, with luggage”, he recalls for El Periódico de Catalunya, from the Prensa Ibérica group, from Ukraine.
After a short farewell between parents and children, interrupted by the urging of the tutors, the bus left with a thirty childrento later join a huge caravan that transported dozens of Ukrainian minors to other parts of the occupied Ukraine under the excuse of keeping them away from the war. The ‘paid holidays’ became, both for Vitali and for many colleagues, a hard and prolonged stay half a year in a dilapidated boarding school run by Russian educators, who tried to erase from his memory any idea of belonging to a State and a culture foreign to the Russian Federation. He kyiv Government estimates that at least 20.000 the minors have been illegally transferred to Russia or Russian-occupied territory for re-education purposes, although it is taken for granted that the true figure it is much higher, since only minors with an identified whereabouts are included in said list.
indoctrination
For Vitali, the intentions of his hosts became clear when, after two weeks near the spa of Eupatoria, on the shores of the Black Sea, where he was able to relax and even swim, he was transferred to a precarious center called ‘Druzhba’ (Friendship). “The pillows were dirty, and the beds had no sheets,” he recalls with his mother. In that precise place, the boy continues, it was where the indoctrination began: “They talked to us all the time about politics, every night for an hour and a half; they told us that Ukraine was not a country, and that Russia was an advanced country“. There were only two options, or assume cultural assimilation or keep silent, since the resistance was harshly sanctioned. “If (the teachers) heard us speak in Ukrainian – he explains – they locked us in a punishment cell”, where there were only two beds and “we were served food without salt or sugar”, a place where he was imprisoned , on occasion with a friend also reluctant to Russification.
In Berislav, meanwhile, Vitali’s mother was concerned to see that, after two weeks, his son did not return. “I went to the director day and night, who lied all the time, until one day she suggested that I take my things and my other children, go to the Crimea in search of Vitali and stay in Anapa”, already in Russian territory internationally recognized. “I told him not to talk, and that I would wait for my son in my country.” Finally, through the good offices of a volunteer organization run and financed by well-known and well-known personalities, she was able to bring about the return of his offspring.
Kateryna Osadcha, a presenter and well-known face in local talent shows, is one of those philanthropic figures who promotes an organization with about forty volunteers dedicated to the search for missing persons. She considers it very dangerous to place children of that age in a situation of “information vacuum“, given his previous experience with refugees from places like Mariupol, where they spent weeks under siege with no news from outside: “Imagine, if the adults there (the Russians) were told that Ukraine had ceased to exist, what would they not do with the refugees? children? They can even tell them that they were born in Russia and not in Ukraine“.
cultural assimilation
This analysis is shared by Miroslava Jarchenkolawyer in Save Ukraine, another of the NGOs involved in rescuing the minors, who maintains that the deportation is nothing more than “one more step” in the process of “cultural assimilation” that Russia has been experiencing in Ukraine “for eight years”, in the provinces occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. Given the limitations on contacts with the enemy country, it is the parents or authorized relatives who must travel in person to Russia to pick up their children, while Save Ukraine is limited to organizing the logistics, preparing the necessary paperwork and financing the trips. “With each expedition, new difficulties arise; I fear even that the arrest warrant of the CPI (against Vladimir Putin and the commissioner Maria Lvova Belova) can create new problems”, since every child who returns is a potential witness to such a serious “crime”. Living proof of these difficulties and obstacles is Svitlana Simak, 55 years old and grandmother of Anastasia, a girl from Kherson who in the summer, at the height of the Russian occupation, insisted on following her classmates and urged her tutor to accept the offer of vacations in Crimea. “It was a very long trip. We had to go through several countries to get to Crimea, we need a week there and a week back,” recalls Svitlana.
Minors housed in Ukrainian institutions, whether orphans or belonging to families without resources, are the most exposed to deportation, denounces Volodimir Sagaydakacting director of Children’s Rehabilitation Center of Kherson. When the Russian invaders arrived, Volodimir immediately understood his intentions regarding the minors under his guardianship. “I hid almost all of them, some I sent with his grandparentsothers with his uncles, I only stayed with five orphans that they had nowhere to go”, he recalls. During the months of occupation, he was visited on several occasions by Russian troops, sometimes accompanied by FSB agents or even Russian journalists. “They took the hard drives from the computers” and they did not stop asking “where were the children”.