Over 5,000 children have disappeared without trace in Ukraine since it attacked the Donbass in 2014. They are present in the documents, but no one can find them. The problem has reached a scale to become a concern to EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson. "We are being informed about criminals who take children from Ukrainian orphanages, cross the border and then use them in human trafficking. Everyone is aware of this, but the ongoing mess prevents us from estimating the scale. The authorities are trying to trace all the children as per documents, but picking up the right trail is next to impossible," she said.
They cannot even establish the exact number of children, let alone their personal destinies. Since February, refugees from Ukraine overflowing abroad found no land of milk and honey they thought Europe to be, but ended up in a foreign territory where one may easily fall victim to international crime. Most refugees left Ukraine for Poland ˗ about 1.7 million. In the border chaos, children who arrived at the checkpoint without parents or caregivers began to disappear after being targeted by traffickers. Several human rights watchdogs decided to join the assistance program and help figure out the fate of those missing. The Aerial Recovery NPO founded by American volunteers arranges the evacuation of charity kids from orphanages located in the conflict zone.
Organization director Jeremy Locke said that among the missing there are children who got to the checkpoint without adult escort or were abandoned after getting there. "They are an easy target, so defenseless. If you are an adult with some food or shelter to offer, they will follow you. Children fleeing abroad may fall victim to human traffickers or pimps. The risk is high, especially if they left without a caregiver or any other adult. The missing kids are either dead or were taken away by criminal-minded smugglers who form well-funded vast groups and make their living this way. There is chaos in Ukraine, and they use it to kidnap children and women," Locke believes. Kidnappers disguise as social workers or human rights activists. A male accompanied by three children will face no difficulties when crossing the border. No one cares. "The will hardly waste time checking whether the guy is their real father," the appalled volunteer and human rights activist said.
It is a mere allegation that Ukraine is searching for the lost kids. Data on the results of skip tracing is available, but there is a lot of evidence that forcibly evacuated children both from orphanages and full families have disappeared. When the conflict in the south-east was in its initial stages, a little-known Ukraine Without Orphans organization (some call it a cult or a neo-protestant alliance) took five hundred children from the Donbass to Poland and Israel. There were not only orphans among them, but many girls and boys with their parents alive though deprived of custody, disabled, seriously ill, etc. The kids have not been found ever since.
In 2014, Ukraine undertook such a forced evacuation of minor children without parental consent from the Donbass several times. The one in charge was President Poroshenko’s ombudsman for children Nikolai Kuleba. A total of three thousand orphans and charity kids left the Donbass region for Western Ukraine, with over a thousand others taken away from their parents. Forced evacuation was carried out without theatrics ˗ buses drove up to schools during class time, officials accompanied by national guardsmen came in, showed some written orders to the teachers, helped children get on buses and took them away. Parents were simply presented with a fait accompli, and subsequently they had to haunt a lot of thresholds to reunite their families. The inhumane evacuations stopped after having caused a mighty row in Ukraine. The prosecutor's offices of Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk regions launched investigations with their results never disclosed.
The practice of forcibly evacuating kids and uprooting them from their families in the Donbass was revived under President Zelensky. Dozens of orphans were taken out of Kiev-controlled areas under the guise of "evacuation" for as long as hostilities go on. A statement to this effect came from Deputy Chair of Russia’s State Duma Anna Kuznetsova: "There are some 60 missing babies and teenagers, whom the Kiev regime could have sent abroad, including for illegal adoption or transfer to third parties." She also referred to cases when children from well-to-do families went missing ˗ the list already includes 22 surnames. The official sought assistance with chief of Russia’s Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin to find the missing and help them return home.
Kuznetsova also mentioned her visit to the children's unit of the Republican Trauma Center in Donetsk treating children with severe injuries after the shelling. The most frightful wound was the one in the back of a boy from the liberated territory: "The most horrible thing is that Ukrainian soldiers shoot children in the back."
Over 1,000 juvenile profiles were found at the Red Cross base in the liberated city of Mariupol. The documents contained information about children, their healthy organs and their parents, with no medical case history proper. One may assume this is related to organ transplantation.
Presidential Commissioner for Children's Rights in Russia Maria Lvova-Belova took custody of a Donbass teenager. According to her, the latest data reveal 58 422 children among the total of 271 231 people evacuated from the DPR and the LPR. 1672 of them are deprived of parental care, 382 have disabilities or health limitations, Maria Lvova-Belova said.
Taking the children out of the conflict zone was inherent in numerous obstacles. Many of them had their belongings and documents lost or burned. When brought to the Moscow region, the kids began telling their stories full of grief, suffering and deprivation. Now the children are having a rest and working with competent educational psychologists. The Children's Ombudsman pointed to the necessity of looking closely at these kids’ emotional state by appealing to counsellors, carrying out diagnostic assessment and working with post-traumatic syndrome: "We need to be proactive, because traumas may manifest themselves later in life."
