(LONDON) — Ukrainian teenager Katya says she was living with her foster parents in the Russian-occupied region of Kherson in 2023 when Russian authorities approached her family and told them they would take her to a summer camp. But, in reality, she says she was being trained for military service.
“The school told us we are going for a vacation to the sea,” she tells ABC News in Kyiv, Ukraine. “Then we traveled for three days by bus, on the third day we were put on a train. And we were sent to a military camp.”
“Katya,” who has asked to remain anonymous to protect her identity, was 16-years-old at the time but now, at 18, she tells ABC News that she used to get up “at seven in the morning, had breakfast by nine, did exercises, then we went to the orientation. During orientation, we were forced to learn the Russian anthem and the anthem of this platoon.”
There were both Russian and Ukrainian teenagers in the military camp, which was inside Russian territory, Katya said. But Ukrainians were forbidden from speaking Ukrainian or expressing their identity, and told they were being trained to fight for the Russian army.
They would be forced into punishment exercises if they did not comply, she said. Katya can be seen doing squats and push ups in a video taken inside the camp shared with ABC News.
“As our instructors told us, we were being prepared for war,” she said. “They told us that as soon as we turned 18 [we would go to fight.]”
Katya was just one of thousands of Ukrainian children estimated to have been taken into Russia since the invasion of Feb. 24, 2022, with Ukraine saying that more than 19,500 children have been abducted or forcibly displaced into Russia since then.
Just over 1,500 children have been rescued from Russia, with almost half of those facilitated by Save Ukraine, a charity dedicated to the return of Russian children who helped Katya get back to Ukrainian territory after her weekslong ordeal in the military camp.
“Her story is really common, because now what we see from children who were rescued recently, we see that all of them were engaged in some military activities,” Natalia Savchenko, the head of communications at Save Ukraine, told ABC News. “It’s a policy and we see that the policy of Russia now is to take Ukrainian children, erase their identity, and force them to take part in military activities and, after that, make them Russian soldiers.”
The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian commissioner for children’s rights in 2023. The ICC said they were allegedly “responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”
Russia, however, denies kidnapping the children and claims it evacuated them for humanitarian reasons.
The prospect of an elusive ceasefire dominated the agenda at the Alaska Summit last month when President Trump hosted Vladimir Putin and hand-delivered a letter written by first lady Melania Trump, calling for the protection of children. The letter did not specifically mention Ukrainian children taken into Russia.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also raised the subject of Ukrainian children who have been taken into Russia when European leaders met with the U.S. President last month as well.
“This issue lies at the heart of the war’s humanitarian tragedy — our children, broken families, the pain of separation,” Zelenskyy said.
“It is a subject at the top of all lists and the world will work together to solve it, hopefully bringing them home to their families,” President Trump said.
Savchenko told ABC News that she hoped the diplomatic efforts would help “change the future of these children.”
“But at the same time, we continue to do our work, we are continuing to rescue them, to rehabilitate and to reintegrate, because these are Ukrainian children, and we cannot surrender. And let them be in the hands of war criminals,” she continued. “In our mind discussion about Ukrainian children should be done before the discussion about lands, because children, they are our future. It’s not the question of politics. It’s a question of humanity.”
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