The Ukrainian girl vanished at the start of the war

The first day of the Russian invasion of Mariupol: Vladimir Bespalov and Maria Bespalaya, their adopted sons, and their legal guardians

When Russian forces invaded their country in late February, Vladimir Bespalov and Maria Bespalaya feared their long-held dream of starting a family through adoption was over.

“I remember that morning of February 24, very clearly,” said Vladimir Bespalov, a 27-year-old railroad worker, of the first day of the war. We thought we were late. We thought we could not adopt because we were in a state of war.

He said the couple tried to do it sooner because of the situation. “We were waiting to earn more money, have a better car, buy a house, and build something to give our children first. We decided to adopt a child now and accomplish these things as a family because of the war.

Weeks later that message would reach a volunteer helping those fleeing Mariupol, a southern city that became emblematic of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruthless campaign to take Ukrainian land, no matter the cost.

Residents were forced underground for weeks while Russian troops pummeled the city with artillery. Almost all of the building has been destroyed or damaged, and there is an unknown number of dead under the rubble.

After his mother was killed by Russian shelling, Bespalov and Bespalaya were told about it by the police.

“The men were drinking alcohol and the children of those neighbors bullied him. Bespalaya told CNN that he was starving and freezing. She is careful not to bring up Ilya’s traumatizing experience in front of him unprompted, but he has told the woman he now calls “mama” everything about his three terrifying weeks in the basement, she says.

Once back in Kyiv, they underwent a complex, four-month process to become Ilya’s legal guardians which involved speaking to therapists, many doctor visits, police background checks, and a government search to ensure the boy had no other living relatives. Various donors, including the Shakhtar Donetsk Football Club, helped provide financial support that allowed the family to find a comfortable home.

The young couple are extremely protective of their son, shielding him from war and trying to give him a sense of security and stability.

“You try to take your mind off the fighting and immerse yourself in spending time with your child. We try to create memories of a normal childhood. Work takes time, but we spend every free moment together,” said Bespalov, who as a crucial railroad worker has not been called up for military service.

But there is nothing normal about war. The two rooms that were put up for possible arrival of a child were a nursery with a white crib and blue bedding and a bunk bed.

I stopped being afraid of adoption. I was confident that we would have a child, and I was confident that I could care for anyone and deal with their character,” she told CNN.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/europe/ukraine-orphaned-boy-new-family-intl-cmd/index.html

A baby with a brain is learning to cope: A two-day journey of Bespalaya and Bespalov to Slovyansk

That plan was also shattered by war. The pair were forced to flee their hometown of Slovyansk, a city in the frontline of the Krasnoyarsk region.

They were finally contacted by a volunteer in Mariupol in April who asked if they could care for the little boy.

They took a two-day car journey to Dnipro to meet the boy they would become a part of their family.

“Now we have that love, that love that makes you a family. We did not have this baby, but our love is real,” Bespalaya said, with Ilya cuddled between her and Bespalov on a playground bench in Kyiv.

Born with a brain, little Ilya is learning to cope. He looked up and said that he was no longer afraid of the dark after he played with a couple in a living room lit by candles. I know the light is going to turn back on.

The Case of Missing Ukrainian Children in Russia: Evidence from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab and U.N. Insights on Russian Social Media

A list of Ukrainian children who were evacuated and held in Russia has not been made public. Russian families have adopted children since Feb. 24, 2022, but the number is unknown. However, Russian officials insist adoption is only permitted for orphans, although evidence gathered by the Yale team shows otherwise.

“This is not a rogue camp or a rogue mayor”, said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. “It is a massive logistical undertaking that does not happen by accident.”

“The Russian government needs to make it seem like everything is normal,” she says, “so that you don’t have to keep a close eye on them because their movements aren’t noticed.”

“In some cases there is adoption, other cases summer camp programs where the kids were slated to return home and never did,” he says, “and in some cases they are re-education camps.”

Raymond said that the most extensive report so far was the one from Yale. He says that it shows chain of command and logistical complexity.

In one statement, officials announced that some children from eastern Ukraine had been dispatched to a St. Petersburg boarding school for the Cadet Corps of the Investigative Committee, an institution educating the next generation of Russian state officials.

The U.N. senior human rights officials have raised the alarm over the activities since the beginning of the war.

The Yale researchers began investigating missing Ukrainian children when the first Russian social media posts appeared last year. The Yale researchers say that the messaging began around the time of Putin’s adoption announcement. He asked not to be named to protect the security of his work from hackers.

“I believe the first place we saw this was on Telegram and then VK,” he says. Telegram is a popular Russian messaging service. The Russian version of Facebook is called VK.

Mapping the Yale Lab: Social Media, News, News Communications and Russian War Crime Investigations with the U.S. State Department’s Crisis Observatory

A partner with the U.S. State Department’s Crisis Observatory, the Yale lab has access to non-classified satellite imagery. For this investigation, it is a key to mapping the camps, said the researcher.

There are about 20 researchers who scour social media posts, news reports, government announcements and Russian messaging services, looking for patterns and connections that otherwise might go unnoticed.

The purpose of the camps appears to be political re education, with more than a dozen of them identified in the report.

According to the report, “this operation is centrally coordinated by Russia’s federal government and involved every level of government.” Several dozen federal, regional and local figures were identified as being directly engaged and politically justifying the program.

The Yale team are all young Internet sleuths who work to verify the data they dig up and document the steps needed to meet the exacting standards and protocols for trial.

Raymond describes the lab’s role as a “cop shop” – a “cyber cop shop,” that is mindful to detail a chain of custody for the evidence produced. He shows us the TV show Law and Order to understand the Lab’s role.

“We are the Jerry Orbach, beat cop side,” he says, “Our job is to collect the evidence, digital evidence, and then how that comports or does not with the law.”

We are showing that we can collect evidence and make it actionable in different ways than before. In the past this scale of operation was only available to governments,” he says.

It is the future of war crimes investigations happening now at the Yale Lab, says Raymond, as civil society uses the same tools as governments, “at scale and at speed.”

The report was produced as a part of the work of the US State Department-backed Conflict Observatory by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. Evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukranian was gathered by the Observatory.

It said that the network is made up of 43 facilities, including Russian-occupied Crimean, the eastern Pacific Coast, and Siberia.

According to Raymond, a camp in Chechnya and a camp in Crimea “appear to be specifically involved in training children in the use of firearms and military vehicles,” but the researchers have not seen evidence at this point that the children trained in these military camps are being sent into conflict.

In many cases, the ability of parents to provide meaningful consent may be considered doubtful in some cases, as the report found that many children are sent with the consent of their parents for an agreed duration of days or weeks and returned to their parents as originally scheduled.

“It’s also critically important to understand that these are children who – the lack of contact that they have, or the only intermittent contact that they may have with their parents, is causing very real and potential harm on a very daily basis,” said Caitlin Howarth, also of Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.

The report said that several dozen federal, regional, and local figures are involved in justifying the program and at least twelve are not on U.S. and/or international sanction lists.

Raymond said that the system is consistent with the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention in regards to the prohibition on transferring children from one group to another.

Ukrainian children getting Russian citizenship and being sent to patriotism schools are often talked about by Russian officials.

A wonderful family from Donbass. What’s going on? What happened to a girl from Mariupol who was born on the streets

The US State Department said in a media note that “the unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and constitutes a war crime.”

Putin has empowered Lvova-Belova to use unspecified “additional measures” to identify children who don’t have parental care in the four Ukrainian regions it claims to have annexed.

UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s organization, has said that “adoption should never occur during or immediately after emergencies,” and that during upheaval, children separated from their parents cannot be assumed to be orphans. The UN furthermore considers forcibly transferring another country’s population within or beyond its borders to be a war crime.

I was crossing a threshold with a lot of apprehension, and I wanted to know how they settled into their new lives and the relationship with parents and kids in the family. All doubts were wiped away in the first few minutes. The family is wonderful.

This is yet another confirmation that the work that we have done on the placement of orphans from Donbass is still worth it. Everything was done right.”

“My thanks go to the British for the attention they have drawn to our mission of helping children in Donbass,” she wrote in June. “In Russia we enjoy friendship as families, as organizations, and as of now, as those affected by sanctions.”

Born in the western city of Penza, Lvova-Belova began her career as a children’s guitar teacher. She eventually became involved in local politics, working her way up through the Russian power structure.

Lvova-Belova posted a news report on Telegram in November detailing how a teenager from Mariupol was put on the streets by the people who cared for him after his mother died of cancer.

Alongside idyllic photos of campfires by the Black Sea, she said last August that Ukrainian children from the Donetsk region are in for an “extraordinary camp season.”

“The camp has nine thematic workshops to enable teenagers to work out their life plans and professional guidelines. We are looking forward to the opening of the camp.

Russian Embassy in Ukraine and the Search for Refugees in the Crimes of April 15, 2005: Arina and Valeria Yatsiuk

The embassy accused the United States of being involved in the deaths of children in eastern Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met Thursday with Maria Lvova-Belova, the official at the center of an alleged Russian government scheme to relocate, reeducate, and sometimes militarily train or forcibly adopt out Ukrainian children.

“You have been doing this for a long time, and I know that the amount of work is growing,” said Putin in video footage of the meeting released by the Kremlin. The number of applications from our citizens regarding the adoption of children from the Donetsk and Luhansk republics is increasing. The (Commissioner’s) Institute has been dealing with this issue for a long time, for almost nine years now.”

A week after Russia invaded, the family of 15-year-old Arina Yatsiuk decided to flee their home near the Ukrainian capital by car. They came upon a group of Russian troops less than a mile down the road.

The soldiers dragged Arina and Valeria out of the back seat after they started shooting. Arina was wounded and put into one car; Valeria was ushered into another.

Valeria was taken to a nearby village, where locals found her standing by the road. The parents were found shot to death in their car.

Family of Missing Children’s Rights at the Magnolia Hotline – an Interaction between a Soldier and a Child in the Vicinity of the Donbas

Yatsiuk, who is based in Poland, said she believes Arina had no documents on her when she went missing, which is perhaps why she hasn’t been officially registered anywhere.

She has not been registered at any of the medical facilities I sent official letters to, according to Yatsiuk in a phone interview.

There have been no new leads since the fall according to a volunteer who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity.

“She is a witness of war crime. She said that if her sister did not understand that her parents had been killed, she would be a victim of a war crime.

The Magnolia hotline has gotten more calls from families of missing children since the start of the full-scale war in February than they have in the previous 20 years.

Its 18 employees work round the clock. They are in touch with the families of missing children, offering psychological and legal help. The group is also conducting its own searches using open-source intelligence techniques, public appeals and social media sleuthing to gather information.

Before the war, most cases were runaways, but now most of them are related to military actions.

A group of children were paraded in front of people in Moscow last month, described by officials as having been rescued from the Donbas. The children were encouraged to hug a uniformed man who they had heard was the one who had saved them from Mariupol.

Maria Lvova-Belova is the Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia. It received a generic acknowledgement of receipt, but no reply.

“They took all the personal files, they took all the hard drives, broke all the monitors, all the CCTV cameras, and took all the Ukrainian history books and a few others that they did not like,” he said.

While he managed to protect the 52 children he had under his guardianship, all between the ages of three and 18 years, he said a separate group of children that had been evacuated to the school from the Mykolaiv region was taken away by Russian troops.

The head of the Mykolaiv school told CNN that the group had been taken against their will to the Black Sea resort of Anapa in Russia. Volunteers helped the group to escape to Georgia. He said the children were there as of February.

As of mid-October, 800 children from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas area were living in the Moscow region, many with families, according to the Moscow regional governor.

“And in the video they showed the boy’s face and said, ‘we saved this poor Ukrainian boy, an orphan, and we took him to a hospital in Luhansk,’” Lypovetska, from Magnolia, told CNN.

It took more than two months to make contact with the father and son. The Ukrainian authorities, along with the NGOs and volunteers, were trying to get the boy out of the country.

The boy was eventually found in Russian-occupied Luhansk. His father was unable to leave the area because he was at risk of being taken captive by the rebels and it was up to his grandmothers to travel to the region.

“It’s impossible to go to Luhansk from Ukraine, so they had to make a big circle through Russia, cross the border, then back through Russia to Europe, and only then back to Ukraine,” Lypovetska said.

A new Russian law that came into effect in May has made it much easier to give Russian citizenship to Ukrainians – as long as they were “orphans, children left without parental care, or incapacitated persons.”

The Chechen state media has published photographs from the camp that have pictures of Kadyrov and Putin with teenagers dressed in white hoodies waving flags.

According to Lvova-Belova, more than 1,000 teenagers from the DPR, LPR, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – the four regions illegally annexed by Putin in September – attended special “rehabilitation programs” that included trips to famous Russian sights and meetings with celebrities.

CNN obtained a voice message sent by 16-year-old Serhiy to his mother in Ukraine from one of the camps. In it, he said: “My friends and I were forced to sing the Russian anthem, but we didn’t sing it. We got no reaction because they didn’t see us. Every day we must sing the Russian anthem. CNN is not disclosing his last name for security reasons.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/europe/ukraine-missing-children-russia-intl-cmd/index.html

Valeria Yatsiuk: a girl who is struggling with the reality of her parents’ murders, or why she might not have been adopted

Valeria was adopted by her aunt and uncle. Oksana Yatsiuk, the aunt, told CNN the little girl was receiving psychological support and was slowly coming to terms with the horrible reality that her parents were murdered.

“We all believe she is alive and we will soon find her. We are considering all options, including that she might have already been adopted,” she added.

Isn’t this patriotism when we have no one else’s children who are our own and all of them are ours? she said, according to an official statement.