gedaliyah

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/48254733

Ksenia Koldin, having just turned 18, managed to recover her brother Sergii after he had been in a re-education camp and was taken in by a Russian family

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Ksenia and Sergii’s journey is similar to that of thousands of other Ukrainian children following the start of the Russian occupation. The difference is that their case had a happy ending. The Ukrainian government has identified more than 19,500 children deported or forcibly removed from their homes by Russian authorities since February 2022, although it estimates the number is much higher — Yale University puts the figure as high as 35,000. Kyiv accuses Moscow of kidnapping these children and brainwashing them as part of a systematic campaign to destroy the country’s future. It is for this practice that the International Criminal Court is seeking the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for the rights of the child, Maria Lvova-Belova.

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According to records from the Ukrainian presidential program Bring Kids Back, only 2,003 children have managed to return. The effort is a combined one: Ukrainian authorities are working on it, but so are non-profit organizations, private individuals, lawyers, and even third countries that mediate to recover the children. In Sergii’s case, his sister’s tenacity was fundamental. By the time she left her training course in Shebekino, the boy was in foster care with a Russian family in Abinsk, in the Krasnodar region. As soon as these new parents learned that Koldin wanted to take him, they tried to sever all communication between the two siblings.

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“I was able to hug him, but he was very distant, he seemed nervous, as if he were hiding something from me,” Koldin recounts. The adoptive family was present. It was May 2023. When the social services officer asked Sergii if he wanted to return, he said no. Koldin asked to see her brother alone. The blow was devastating. “He told me he wouldn’t go back because the Nazis ruled Ukraine and there was a war, it was a dangerous country,” she relates. But she stayed with him; they talked for more than three hours. She told him she missed him, that they had to be together. Finally, she offered him a month with her as a sort of trial period, and if he decided he wanted to return to Russia, she would let him. The boy agreed.

More than two years later, the two siblings are living in Kyiv. He, at 14, lives with a Ukrainian family and is continuing his studies at high school. She is in her third year of a journalism degree. “Sergii doesn’t talk about Russia anymore,” says Koldin, “I think he’s happy because he’s always smiling.”

— And you?

— Me too.

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