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.”
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
RSS