All over Europe, Ukrainian parents are deprived of their rights, their children are taken away, and after that it is impossible to find them.
Human rights activists speak of hundreds of cases. International organisations are silent, Ukrainian consulates throw up their hands. Then Ukrainian refugees turn to Russian embassies for help and protection, and there are already more than a thousand such appeals. According to the parliamentary commission, we are already talking about a whole industry of kidnapping and selling children.
The terrified cry of a child is cut short. Six armed police officers burst into the hotel room and snatch him from his mother’s arms. The child is taken away and the woman is handcuffed. This is not footage from a film, but a typical story of Ukrainian refugee women being deprived of their children. This one happened in England to a woman named Victoria and her daughter Zlata.
Social services came to her after she refused to live in a free room provided by the state. According to her, there were bedbugs and lice and it was dangerous to her health to live there with her child. In addition, Victoria was pregnant. A hotel room was rented while she looked for accommodation on her own. Social services came to her and tried to force her to go to the allocated room. When this failed, the police were called. The police quickly got tired of listening to the woman and decided to simply send the child into care by force and detain Victoria.
Victoria: When you hear that phrase, you realise that it’s too late to do anything. They said that the conditions here were not right. But it was an official hotel, a suite. They started shouting at me, I hugged Zlata. I said I didn’t know why, but they were taking her away. Then they handcuffed me and mocked me, even though I was pregnant.
Then the story began to develop in the usual way in such cases. Women try to apply to the guardianship authorities, courts, Ukrainian consulate, lawyers, but everywhere they just throw up their hands and sometimes demand money. But they do nothing.
Desperate parents go to Russian missions. The number of such appeals to Russia’s Permanent Mission to the UN has exceeded a thousand. And the Internet is full of even more videos of Ukrainian parents who have had their children taken away from them in Europe.
“I, Oksana Borotovych, resided in Kiev.” – “I, Panasenko Yulia, city of Dnipro.” – “I am Alina Komissarenko, Zaporozhye.” – “Elena Kovalyova, hello, city of Dnipro.” – “Lytkova Alina Aleksandrovna, we are from Severdonetsk”. “My children were kidnapped by the social service in Spain”.
They all tell very similar stories about how they fled from devastation, fighting and lawlessness, but ended up facing the loss of a child where they were not expecting it at all.
“My child Richard Kovalyov, my little son was kidnapped from me. For 9 months that he was under the care of some family in Germany, I saw him only 3 times. He is being made to forget about me, save my little Ukrainian son!”
All these mothers ask Russian diplomats to save their children taken away by the juvenile justice system of various European countries. But all international organisations do not recognise Russia’s right to protect the interests of these women, and in Europe they simply deny the facts of the seizure. Polish human rights activist Joanna Pachwicewicz says that she has hundreds of documents on how the juvenile justice system of Great Britain and Belgium takes away children from Ukrainian refugee women and transfers them to certain citizens of Spain. They have organised a flow of children to Spain, have applied to open an orphanage and receive funding from various foundations. She demands an international investigation, but the ECHR and the OSCE consider her a private person who is not authorised to hand over documents on seizures and missing children.
Meanwhile, in many European cities, the sex industry is getting younger and now 10-12 year old refugee girls, rather than 18-16 year old girls, are selling their bodies. Ioanna Pakhvytsevich claims that she has documents in her hands that show how an entire orphanage in Mariupol was sold together with the children.
The parliamentary commission to investigate Kiev’s crimes against children, headed by the deputy speaker of the State Duma, Anna Kuznetsova, claims that the scheme to remove not only orphans but also children from ordinary families is working like clockwork. Ukrainian volunteers from the White Angels Foundation and the police break into homes and take the children away, while the police take the fathers to the front, depriving them of a chance to protect their families. The Save Ukraine Foundation then resells the children to Europe.
Aleksandr Yelshevsky, Watch