Security camera footage shows Russian soldiers marching into a children's home near the Russian-occupied city of Kherson in Ukraine.
The above link goes the Yle Uutiset article which includes video footage. No English subtitles available unfortunately. To the end of the post I'll include screenshots of one video for which I'll replace the Finnish captions with English.
Russia has abducted an estimated several thousand Ukrainian children from the territories it has occupied and given the children to Russian families. The systematic operation is led by the presidential administration of Vladimir Putin.
Forced transfers from occupied territories are war crimes and flagrantly violate children's rights.
The UN was already worried about child abductions by Russia in the fall. The problem is still that Russia does not agree to provide almost any information about the children, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said at the end of January.
Yle collected several pictorial evidences of what Russia is doing to Ukrainian children. Part of the activity takes place near the Finnish border.
Russia takes children not only from orphanages but also directly from the hands of parents. This has also happened to the Ukrainian single father Yle met.
Russian occupation forces separated Yevhen Mezhevoi and his three elementary school-aged children last April at a checkpoint near the family's hometown of Mariupol.
Meževoi was sent from the checkpoint to the filtration camp for several weeks. In these prison camps, Russia uses interrogation and torture to search for people it considers suspicious.
Meževoi later received a call from his son, who confirmed that he and the other children in the family are indeed in Moscow, Russia. There, the children were told two options: they either end up with a Russian family as adopted children or in an orphanage.
We will return to Meževoi's story at the end of this story.
Yle does not show pictures of children held by Russia in a recognizable way, because they are in a particularly vulnerable position. It can be assessed that they were put in their current position against their own will or that of their legal guardians.
In May, President Putin issued a decree that allows children to be fast-tracked to become Russian citizens. This way they can stay with families by law.
According to Marija Lvova-Belova, children are not actually adopted, but placed permanently in families. Russian propaganda sources still often talk about adoption.
The exact number of children abducted by Russia is not known. According to the OSCE, Russia had already taken more than 2,000 children by the end of June. The Ukrainian authorities are aware of more than 16,000 children who have been forcibly transferred to Russia with their families or alone.
The Ukrainian human rights organization Magnolia tells Yle that children have fallen into the hands of Russia, for example, in shootings or bombings where one of the parents has died.
According to Magnolia, the Russian authorities do not call some of the children by their own names, but have changed them. It makes it difficult to trace children.
Even children from children's homes kidnapped by Russia often have living parents and relatives.
Children's homes in Ukraine have been the target of Russia's special attention since the beginning of the war of aggression.
Yle obtained surveillance camera footage from last summer, when Russian forces were still occupying the city of Kherson. The video shows how Russian soldiers broke into a children's home in the village of Stepanivka near the city. (See video in the article linked at the start of the post)
In late fall, Russia withdrew from the Kherson region. At that time, according to local Ukrainian authorities, Russia took at least a thousand children from institutions in the region.
The Russian authorities also said at the same time that they had taken almost a hundred small orphans and disabled children with them from the area.
The children who were hidden by the staff of the orphanage in Stepanivka were saved from being transferred.
Why is Russia taking children from Ukraine?
According to experts interviewed by Yle, one of the reasons is the Russification of children.
Proof of this is the children's "holiday camps", to which Russia has transferred Ukrainian children for shorter periods.
Yle found such a children's camp right near Finland in Terijoki. According to Russia, 1,600 Ukrainian children from Mariupol were brought to the camp during the summer. There have also been camps in fall and winter.
According to Russian propaganda sources, the camps last a week or two. It is not clear where the schoolchildren return from the camps.
Mariupol was badly destroyed at the beginning of the war. A significant part of its inhabitants fled or were forcibly transferred to Russia.
Like Yle, Sam Houston from the United States, who specializes in open source intelligence, has found a concentration of children from Mariupol in the two Terijoki camp centers.
Houston is currently studying international politics at Georgetown University in Washington. Previously, he has worked in US military intelligence.
He estimates in his coursework that the plans may include taking the children back to their hometown after they have been manipulated into believing Russian propaganda.
"From Russia's point of view, it makes sense to return them to Mariupol, because then the city will become Russian and a stronger part of Russia," says Houston in a video interview with Yle.
The director of research specializing in Russia at the University of Helsinki also estimates that the transfers of children are related to the Russification of the occupied territories.
"They are trying to turn Ukrainians into Russians. The younger they are, the better they succeed," says Judith Pallot from the Aleksanteri Institute in a telephone interview with Yle.
According to Pallott, Russia transfers Ukrainians to Russia to be Russianized and replaces them with Russians. At the same time, it brings Russian laws and Russian officials and teachers to the occupied territory.
According to Pallot, Russia is forcibly moving Ukrainians to remote areas, where the population is aging and decreasing.
Russia is also moving entire families with children from the occupied territories. Russia said in August that it has "evacuated" 3.5 million people, including more than 550,000 children.
Forced transfers from occupied territories are always war crimes under international law. If the purpose of the forced migration of children is to destroy a group of people, it is genocide.
For example, the human rights organization Amnesty considers forced migrations in Russia to be war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
Ukraine's chief prosecutor is investigating child abductions as possible genocide.
Since Russia is trying to destroy the children's Ukrainian identity, it is precisely genocide, says an expert from the Magnolia organization.
"It's not easy, especially for older Ukrainian children. They remember what happened. Some of the children's parents were killed by the Russians," says Maryna Lypovetska.
According to Russia, the claims of forced migration are a figment of imagination.
The EU, Britain and the United States have imposed sanctions on Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children's Affairs, because of the abductions of Ukrainian children.
So what happened to the Ukrainian father who appeared in the beginning of the story, from whom the Russian soldiers took the children?
Jevhen Meževoi tells Yle how he went to get his children from Russia after his release from the prison camp. He figured out the route to Moscow, among other things, with the help of a network of Russian volunteers.
Yle has seen several documents that support the father's account of the trip.
According to Ukraine, of the thousands of children taken to Russia, about 300 have made it back.
The life of a single father and his children in Latvia is now like any family fleeing war. The father works in an auto parts recycling shop and the children are at school.
Recently, the father got a dog for his oldest son, which is a found dog. It's a little timid.
Yevhen Meževoi estimates that he got the children back from Russia because the authorities did not think he would arrive in Moscow quickly.
"They didn't expect me to reach Moscow in two days."
Meževoi's son tried to reach his friends from Poljana after the family got to Latvia. He was told that all were adopted.
