kyiv, Ukraine-Armed with machine guns, Russian soldiers dressed in Balaclava broke into the house of Vladislav Rudenko, 16 in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine and gave him half an hour to gather some things.
“I was alone at home. I packed my things in panic,” the teenager told NBC News, describing the morning in October 2022, eight months after the Russian forces captured the city, when he said that the soldiers forced him to get into a car and led “in an unknown direction.”
It was the beginning of an eight -month nightmare when the adolescent became part of a systematic effort of Russia to relocate and re -educate thousands of children from Ukraine, in some cases adopting them by force while sending others to military training fields.
In a meeting with President Donald Trump and several European leaders in the White House last month, Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine raised the issue of the “kidnapped children” of Ukraine. His comments occurred three days after Trump met with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska to talk about the end of the war.
While little progress has been made towards a high fire since then, Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine, a leading non -governmental organization that supports people who try to ensure the return of their children of the Russian, the approach of world leaders insisted that “the approach must remain in children, not only on earth.”
Kuleba, whose organization says that it has rescued more than 750 children from Russia and Ukrainian territories occupied by their forces, says that the impulse of its elimination and reeducation came from the highest levels of the Kremlin.
The International Criminal Court accused Putin of the war crime of supervising the illegal kidnapping and deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia, and in March 2023 issued an arrest warrant. The ICC also accused Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Putin presidential commissioner for the rights of the child, of committing similar crimes.
“They force these children to be Russians, to be Russian soldiers,” Kuleba He said in a telephone interview last month, he added: “The Russian regime has a clear intention of annihilating Ukrainian identity.”
NBC News has communicated with the Ministry of Defense of Russia and in the office of Lvova-Belova to comment on the kidnapping of Vlad and the arrest of the CPI.
Vlad said that he was taken to two camps in Crimea, the Peninsula of the Black Sea that Russia seized Ukraine and attached in 2014, and then to a naval academy in the Kherson region occupied by Putin’s forces.
“They tried to break in all possible ways,” he said, adding that he was treated “very bad” and denied food in the first camp because “he began to show my pro-charanian position.”
On one occasion, he said, “the Russian flag knocked down and hung my underwear there.” This led him to be thrown into solitary confinement for a week, he said, adding that his captors “fed me twice a day, they did not allow me to communicate with anyone.”
Again, he said, the head of security in one of the camps torn the shirt of a girl and trampled because he carried the coat of arms of Ukraine.
In regular classes with other Ukrainian children whose ages ranged between 6 and 18, said: “We learned everything about Russia only, the history of Russia, etc.”, adding that they also talked about recent events in the war, such as what the Ukrainian territories had been captured.
“I understood that Russia is an aggressor country and took my childhood and cut my contacts with my family so that I did not see them,” he said.
On the morning of his capture, Vlad said, he had managed to call his mother, Tatiana, 38, To tell him that he had been kidnapped.
Tatiana said she was not at home when she was taken because she had been taken to the Russian commander’s office to write a statement about her mother, Rudenko Tamara, 53, 53. who died in an attack the day before. They wanted her to say “that Ukraine killed my mother,” he said.
In the call, Tatiana said, Vlad told him that he was in the city of Olezhky and that “he was going to rest,” which left her bewildered. “At that time we only had a little fight,” he added. “I simply said: ‘How could you leave your family at such a difficult time?’ I didn’t know any detail. “
Together with other parents, he only realized much later that the Russian soldiers had been training children to say that they were being evacuated from bombings and sent to summer camps.
With the intense fight in Kherson, even after the Russian forces were expelled from the city in November 2022, Tatiana said that the month after kidnapping, he decided to move west to the city of Mykolaiv.
Together with her husband, Olexsandr, 43, who is also Vlad’s stepfather, left the city with her other biological children, including the baby Stefania, who had less than a year at that time. NBC News agreed not to use Oleksandr’s last name, since he was called to the Ukraine Army in February 2023 and is still serving. His sister and cousin joined them as they headed west towards the city of Mykolaiv.
Although Vlad’s phone was routinely reviewed by his Russian captors, Tatiana said, he could keep in touch with his son through occasional text messages, but “he told him not to create problems.”
“I said when you can, if you are alone or nobody is escorting you, then writes,” he said, adding that he could establish that he was stopped at a camp in Lazurne in southeast Ukraine.
After a friend told her about Save Ukraine, Tatiana said, she communicated with the organization, that after several months of planning she organized that she traveled to Russia along with six other women whose children had been taken.
Without a direct route on the front, said Tatiana, traveled through Poland, Belarus and the capital of Russia, Moscow, before he could finally travel to the camp through Crimea.
No one from Save Ukraine accompanied the group, he said, but his representatives were in contact by phone and organized that a volunteer put him in a temporary home.
Although it was sought abruptly by masked men on arrival, Tatiana said, things initially seemed to go well. But on the second day, he said, agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the KGB espionage agency, approached, put a mask on the head and took her somewhere to interrogate him, after “confiscate my documents and my phone.”
“They interrogated me, maybe six or seven hours,” he said, adding that he was locked in a basement cell during the night before interrogating the next morning. His interrogators were particularly interested in saving Ukraine, he said.
They also brought a cameraman and a journalist, who said she hoped she said “how big is Russia, how it helps us and how bad Ukraine is for us.”
While it was initially reluctant, he said, he was able to use Vlad’s phone to consult with Save Ukraine through text messages. Tatiana said the group said: “Do what is necessary, just to go from there.”
NBC News has communicated with the FSB to comment.
After giving the interview on the camera, he said, she was released with Vlad and allowed her to make the hard trip home.
“It was just happiness after horror … I was simply amazed,” Tatiana said.
The kidnapped children are now extended through approximately 200 locations from the Black Sea to the Russian Pacific coast, according to Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Laboratory of the School of Public Health (HRL) of the Yale School of Public Health (HRL), the main monitoring of kidnapped Ukrainian children.
The group has monitored the movement of children analyzing satellite photos and photographing aircraft and vehicles apparently used to transport children, among other techniques.
“Not everyone comes from the same place. Not everyone goes to the same place. Not everyone has the same purpose,” Raymond said in a telephone interview last month.
The sens. Lindsey Graham, RS.C. and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., have raised the possibility of introducing a bill in the Senate that, if approved, could designate Russia and Belarus as state sponsors of terrorism about the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, a source familiar with the bill told NBC News in mid-August. A draft bill says that Belarus “has directly supported the kidnapping of Ukrainian children and has supported their relocation.”
But both Save Ukraine and HRL received a financial spring after the Trump administration reduced the funds for their programs.
While Russia presses to take control of more Ukrainian territory, rescuing Ukrainian children has become an even more urgent problem, experts say.
“That is one more reason to recover all the children we can before the door closed,” Raymond said.
“Now is the decisive moment in which the United States cannot afford to step back,” added Kuleba, of Save Ukraine.
As for Vlad, who is now 19, he said that thinking about his family kept him during his time in captivity, and hurried to see his Stefania sister as soon as he came home.
Now in the capital of Ukraine, kyiv, hopes to become a sports coach.
“What helped me all the time was probably that I had a family in Ukraine,” he said. “And I could return to Ukraine and build a normal future.
Daryna Mayer reported from Kyiv and Babak Dehghanpisheh in New York.
