At their home in the middle of Siberia, Russian pastor Roman Vinogradov and his wife, Yekaterina Vinogradova, are the new foster parents of five children from Moscow-occupied eastern Ukraine.
The Vinogradovs are experienced foster parents now raising 16 children, including four of their own, and say they just want to help those who are “very much in need.”
However, Ukraine and human rights groups have condemned the forced transfer of thousands of children into Russia or Moscow-controlled territory since the invasion started on Feb. 24 last year.
Photo: AFP
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last week referred to “kidnapping, forced adoption and re-education of Ukrainian children committed by Russia,” calling it “a war crime and a crime against humanity.”
Russia says it is simply taking in “refugee” children from Ukraine.
“I didn’t steal anyone, and they [the children] don’t think they were stolen,” said Vinogradov, a 41-year-old Protestant minister.
Photo: AFP
The couple, who live in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, more than 3,000km east of Moscow, said that local authorities asked them to take in Ukrainian children after they requested another child.
“They phoned from children’s services, saying: ‘Will you take children from Ukraine?” 38-year-old Vinogradova said.
“We said: ‘Yes, we’ll take them,’” she said. “What difference does it make? Children are children everywhere.”
The couple are now fostering five Ukrainian half-siblings — four girls and a boy aged three to 12, who arrived from Moscow six months ago. They already had seven foster children.
The husband and wife say the Ukrainian children came from children’s homes in the city of Lugansk, which has been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014. They showed foster papers issued by officials from Lugansk’s pro-Moscow administration.
The children do not recall their mother, who was stripped of her parental rights, Vinogradov said.
“The time will come of course when they ask questions. We’ll have a look [for her]. Maybe we’ll organize a meeting,” Vinogradova said.
According to international law, no party to a conflict should evacuate children to a foreign country except temporarily for a compelling health or safety reason.
Ukrainian Residential Commissioner for Children’s Rights and Child Rehabilitation Daria Gerasymchuk said that Russia was refusing to recognize that these children were “deportees.”
“Russians hide our children,” she told journalists last week.
Kyiv has so far brought back 308 children, Gerasymchuk said, with a “big team of government officials working to this end.”
Ukraine has “many pieces of evidence coming from different cities,” and has identified 43 children’s camps in Russia, but children “are being moved around all the time,” she said. “We have evidence of how much effort was taken by Russia to make it impossible to reunify families.”
Volodymyr Sagaidak, the head of a children’s rehabilitation center outside the Ukrainian city of Kherson, said in January that during Russian occupation, officials questioned him on the children’s whereabouts and seized their files.
Oksana Koval, a 49-year-old teacher at the center, said that after the city was occupied, they quickly handed over most of the children, aged three to 17, to relatives. Staff took others home. Koval herself took three girls.
“The Russians didn’t know we had the children. We told them the children had been taken home by their parents,” she said. “We cared only about one thing — saving the children.”
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