Tens of thousands of young Ukrainians have been abducted and indoctrinated, some with no memory of their parents
Christina Lamb, Kyiv
March 14, 2026
The Sunday Times
“If you are my mum, why can’t I remember you?” Yuri, four, asked the woman in the Moscow hotel room. “Why weren’t you with us?” “You were stolen from me,” Olga tried to explain tearfully. “It wasn’t my choice.” Yuri is thought to be the youngest child to be returned so far of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russians. He was just a baby of ten months when he and his sister Anastasia, then three, were snatched from a children’s home in the southern city of Kherson in 2022. “I thought I would never see them again,” said Olga, 39.
Last month, however, Yuri and Anastasia, now four and six, along with three siblings from another family, aged four, six and seven, became the first children abducted from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home to be returned to their parents — with the unlikely help of the first lady of the US, Melania Trump. Some see it as a Russian PR move.
The wholesale abduction of Ukrainian babies and children from care homes in Kherson is one of the most shocking tales in what is perhaps the most horrific story of the four-year war: the forcible deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia and Belarus.
Some 19,951 Ukrainian children have been registered as abducted since the 2022 invasion, although experts believe the true figure to be at least 35,000. An inquiry commissioned by the UN and published on Tuesday found that Russia’s forcible transfers of children amounted to a crime against humanity and were a state policy with “visible” involvement from the highest levels of government, including Putin himself.
Melania Trump has taken a particular interest in this issue, writing a letter to Putin asking for the children to be returned and highlighting the issue last week when she became the first spouse of a world leader to chair a session of the United Nations security council.
A total of 19 Ukrainian children have now been returned from Russia as a direct result of Melania Trump’s intervention, The Sunday Times can reveal, including Yuri and Anastasia. Last month I met them in a playroom in Save Ukraine’s Hope and Healing Centre in Kyiv. They looked like normal children as they ran around the room excitedly: Yuri bo bounced around on a space hopper and played with cars on a traffic mat, while a fitted shapes on a plastic activity centre and reached for picture books from the shelves. But they have been through a nightmare.
‘You have no mother’
Abducted teenagers are sent to “re-education camps” or youth military training to be conscripted to fight against their own country. Yuri and Anastasia, like many little ones, were given to a Russian family and told “you have no mother”.
Yuri and Anastasia had been placed in the Ukrainian children’s home after Olga suffered mental health problems. Until recently she had no idea what had happened to them.
Ukrainian officials working on finding them say it is getting harder and admit many may never come back. Now they fear that the war in Iran is moving international attention. “So far, there is only one winner in this war — Russia,” said António Costa, president of the European Council, in a speech to EU ambassadors in Brussels last week. “It’s particularly hard to get these little kids back,” said Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine, which has rescued 1,152 children — more than half of the 2,000 brought back so far. “A baby has no sense of being Ukrainian. And unlike older ones who manage to make contact, these have no idea what is happening to them.”
Adopted by a Russian MP’s wife
What happened in the Kherson orphanage is particularly chilling — a crime for which the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for President Putin and his children’s commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova.
When Russian troops invaded the city four years ago, they took over three children’s homes containing about 140 children. Among them was the Kherson Regional Children’s Home, which housed more than 60 children aged between four months and four years old, including some who were disabled, some who had cerebral palsy and some who were autistic. Some were orphans; others were wards of the state because their parents were deemed vulnerable because of psychological problems, alcoholism or struggling to look after them.
The director of the home tried to contact parents to get their children out, but 52 children remained as the Russians surrounded them. They stationed tanks and military vehicles right in front to use the children as human shields so Ukrainian forces would not attack their position. The orphanage had no bomb shelter or basement.
Staff working with a local church and helped by Save Ukraine managed to get the children out and into a basement beneath the Golgotha Church. For 52 days, the staff and children stayed there in secret. But then a Ukrainian official mentioned their plight on social media. The next day Russian soldiers arrived, led by a man dressed in military fatigues. It later emerged that this was Igor Kastyukevich, who was an MP in the Russian Duma.
The children were taken back to the orphanage, where a new director had been appointed and appeared in Russian propaganda videos with visiting officials. One day in August, a Russian woman in a lilac dress appeared — later identified by investigators as Inna Varlamova, wife of another MP, Sergei Mironov, a close associate of Putin. According to staff, Varlamova chose a baby girl, Margarita Prokopenko, and left with her on the midnight train. Legal documents show that three months later the Podolsk town court in Moscow agreed to the official adoption of “Marharyta” Prokopenko by the couple.
On October 21, 2022, ambulances and buses with Crimean number plates appeared at the gate of the institution. Staff were told to write the children’s names on their little hands with marker pens, then they were bundled on board, along with boxes of their medical history. Kastyukevich
oversaw the operation and posted video on his Telegram account calling it a “humanitarian evacuation”.
As the staff were left staring at the empty cots, the children were taken to occupied Crimea. Forty-seven were placed in Yalynka kindergarten in Simferopol. “The fate of these children appears deeply troubling,” said Anastasia Dovbnya, head of government relations for Save Ukraine. “Some disappeared along the way and it is unknown what happened to them, while the others were presented in a kind of catalogue and delegations of Russian prospective adoptive parents were brought to the kindergarten to choose.” She added: “We’ve been trying to rescue them for the last two and a half years but had no idea where they were.”
The wholesale kidnapping of children from the Kherson Regional Children’s Home was one of the first cases to be cited as evidence by the ICC when issuing their arrest warrants against Putin and Lvova-Belova. “This is one of the starkest examples of Russia’s cynicism,” said Kateryna Rashevska, 28, who, as lead on international justice at Ukraine’s Regional Centre for Human Rights, has prepared submissions to the ICC regarding crimes against Ukrainian children committed by Russians.
“The forcible transfer of these children to the Russian Federation and the occupied Crimean peninsula, accompanied by changes in citizenship and, in some cases, personal data, has significantly complicated their return,” Rashevska said. “Due to their very young age, these children had not yet formed a strong Ukrainian identity. Without a proper response from the international community, they risk remaining in Russia permanently, unaware of their origins, their families, their language, culture and nation.”
The plight of these and children taken from two other homes in Kherson was raised at the United Nations, and they also became part of negotiations through Qatar, which has mediated with Russian authorities for the release of some of the children.
Until recently there had been no progress. Then Melania Trump wrote to Putin, pleading with him to return the children, which she said “will do more than serve Russia alone” and “will serve humanity itself”. Her letter was given to Putin in August last year during his visit to Alaska for talks with her husband.
Since then “three groups of children, 19 in total, have been released through Melania Trump’s efforts”, said Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner for human rights. He declined to provide further details of the first lady’s intervention.
The most recent group was the five from Kherson, including Olga’s children who had been issued Russian documents and adopted in 2023.
Olga and the other mother were told to go to Moscow via Ukraine’s land border with Belarus, then take a flight. “I was really nervous,” she said. “We were going into enemy territory and I didn’t know what to expect.”
The children she hadn’t seen for almost four years were handed over to her in front of Russian TV cameras. “It was deeply traumatic for everyone involved,” Dovbnya said. “The children had
never been told they had a biological mother and were not prepared in any way for her arrival. As a result the reunion was extremely painful, the children simply did not understand who this woman was or why she had come for them.” “My son had gone from a baby to a child who could walk and talk and didn’t recognise me,” Olga said.
Fortunately, her daughter remembered her mother. “She called me Mum,” Olga said, smiling.
Two weeks later, at the Hope and Healing Centre back in Ukraine, the children jump on a sofa with a giant yellow bear and hug their mother. “Now it’s as if a huge burden was lifted from my shoulders,” she said. “And I am thankful to Melania.”
After a two-week rehabilitation programme, the children have now moved into an apartment in Kyiv with their mother and grandmother, under care of the state. “They now face a very long journey of recovery, rebuilding trust and restoring their bond,” Kuleba said.
While delighted to see the children back with their mother, he is uneasy about how it was arranged. “This was a cynical PR move from the Russians wanting to curry favour with Trump,” he said. “The children are a political tool.” He added: “Maria Lvova-Belova announced, ‘We helped reunite these children with the mother’ as if it was her initiative. In fact, she worked hard to kidnap them and hide them from their mothers.”
Kuleba pointed out that Russia had constitutionally decreed that occupied territories including Kherson and Zaporizhzhia were part of its federation — “so they can say any children from there are actually Russian and we are ‘Nazis’ kidnapping them, when in fact we are rescuing them”.
In January, Russia implemented new rules meaning children under 14 need a Russian passport to travel outside occupied territory. “It’s getting harder and harder to get kids back,” Kuleba said. “Russia is afraid to let any escape because they are evidence for future trials. The [best] way now is through kids who have already been rescued putting us in touch with others or reaching out to them.”
One of those recently rescued was a boy, now 17, taken from the eastern region of Donbas in February 2022, three days before the invasion, and who Kuleba said would give evidence. “He is proof that they had started taking kids even before the full-scale invasion. Around 60,000 from Donbas were taken across the border in the three days before.”
‘This is genocide’
Lubinets, who holds an ombudsman role negotiating prisoner of war exchanges with Russia, said he had regularly visited Ukraine’s five PoW camps for Russian combatants and had met fighters who were taken from Donetsk, which was occupied in 2014. He said he had met a recently captured man who told him he was 16 when Russia occupied his region. “I’m from the same region and asked him, ‘why did you join the Russian army?’ He said, ‘Look, you have to understand — you either go to the Russian army or you go to Russian prison. I didn’t have any choice’.”
Lubinets added: “It’s forcible militarisation of the local population and of Ukrainian children. First, after occupation, all children must learn so-called real Russian history, where they are told
that Ukraine as a state doesn’t exist and never existed: ‘You children, you were always Russian children. You must use only Russian language. You must join youth military organisations and need to be Russian soldiers. And you must even die for your motherland’.” He called on the international community to recognise what is happening as genocide. “Forcibly transferring children from one ethnic group to another must be confirmed as a war crime — genocide,” he said.
Although the issue of the abducted children has been raised by the Ukrainian side during peace negotiations, Lubinets believes they will never get all the children back. “Time works against us,” he said. “It is very hard for us to get back a very young child. Because young children can forget about their roots, even about their parents.”
Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times. Lamb has won sixteen major awards including four British Press Awards and the European Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents. She is an Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a Global Fellow for the Wilson Centre for International Affairs in Washington D.C. In 2013 she was appointed an OBE by the Queen for services to journalism. In November 2018, Lamb received an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the University of Dundee. She has written ten books including the bestselling The Africa House and I Am Malala, co-written with Malala Yousafzai, which was named Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the British National Book Awards 2013.