Some of the most unsettling features of the Russia-Ukraine war have been claims that the Russian military has been deporting children. Russian soldiers took children from orphanages in Ukrainian port city of Kherson, as per a report in Sky News. According to Ukrainian officials, 97 orphans were kidnapped by the Russian military as they evacuated the Kherson region. Child kidnapping is a serious violation of the rules of war.
Volodymyr Sahaidak, Director of an orphanage in the village of Stepanivka, located outside Kherson spoke to Sky News. He said he knew he had to take action to protect his children when Russian soldiers occupied the area. In the Donbas region, where a civil war began 2014, he had witnessed what Russian soldiers had done to orphans.
"We saw Russian propagandists saying that they need to take the orphans to give them to military schools, indoctrinate them and let them fight for Russia," he said.Mr Sahaidak said that they had to hide children to avoid the same happening here. "It was the scariest thing so we started hiding children because we understood they would take them."
As per a video by Sky News, CCTV footage shows the terrifying moment Russians arrived to find the children. The outlet says that the clip "shows agents with Russia's secret police, the FSB, leading soldiers with rifles through a building that should be a place of sanctuary."
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Mr Sahaidak told the outlet that the soldiers confiscated children's files "because they couldn't figure out where the children were, so they took files, they took computers, they took away the CCTV system because they wanted to know where the children had gone."
The entire village came together to protect the children, taking three to four of them per family.The orphans were never located by the Russians, who instead sent the orphanage fifteen additional children from other parts of Ukraine, Sky News said. All 15 youngsters were taken along when Russian forces at last withdrew from the area.
