She was forced to sing the Russian national anthem and harassed for speaking Ukrainian. How a girl from the Luhansk region managed to return from Russia

In August 2023, a father took his two children, a boy and a girl, to Russia from an occupied village in the Luhansk region without their mother’s permission. The girl did not want to live in Russia and managed to return to Ukraine to reunite with her mother, who had been fighting for the children’s return all along.

Realna Gazeta prepared the story about the family from the Luhansk region in cooperation with The Reckoning Project.

In February 2022, a resident of Sievierodonetsk took her two children, a son and a daughter, to the village to live with her ex-husband’s mother. They were a very close-knit and loving family, who used to organise gatherings and cook together. 

However, the war changed everything. 

In the very first days of the full-scale invasion, the city came under attack from the Russians, so the woman decided that the children would be safer in the village.

“I was well aware that the city would be shelled. Therefore, to save the lives and health of the children, I took them out of the city. We even wrote a notice to the children’s school, we took a vacation for 10 days. I thought: “They will sit it out, everything will calm down, these soldiers will be driven away, and the children will return.” We were sure that everything would end very quickly,” the woman said.

The city had been shelled with Grads and mortars, and it was dangerous to be there. The woman spent 80 days in Sievierodonetsk under fire and miraculously managed to leave for Kyiv via Zaporizhzhia. Meanwhile, the village where her children lived with their grandmother was occupied by Russians.

It was difficult to communicate with the children because the Russians jammed the connection. Often, the mother risked her life by climbing to some high point to hear her children’s voices. Then the network disappeared entirely.

In August 2023, the children’s father came to the village and took advantage of his ex-wife’s absence to take them to Russia. The woman discovered this when her son and daughter were already in Russia. 

The woman claims that in 2014, the father of her children fought on the side of the so-called LPR. According to her, she did not communicate with her ex-husband primarily because of his separatist views.

The children’s mother said that a relative of her ex-husband had made Russian passports for her son and daughter without any documents proving their identities. The mother said:

“I had all the children’s documents, birth certificates in Kyiv. The children had only ID cards, which they did not give for registration. However, they were issued Russian passports. The occupational authorities somehow managed to do it, probably based on the words of the children’s father and grandmother.”

The boy did not protest against being taken to Russia, but the girl did not want to go and asked her father to send her to her mother in the territory controlled by the Ukrainian state. However, the father was not interested in her opinion. He took the children to Russia, forced them to enrol in local educational institutions, and left them there alone.

The children’s mother kept in touch with them via Telegram. Her daughter told her how she was humiliated and harassed in a Russian educational institution for her pro-Ukrainian position.

In particular, the girl was forced to sing the Russian anthem and was told that Ukraine had no right to exist.

“My daughter said that she didn’t need the Russian anthem and didn’t have to stand for the Russian flag. They were told they would be taught and educated there and become Russians. Ukraine, they said, was a sub-state, sub-humans. And they said that ‘Khokhly are pigs,'” the woman recalled.

She noted that the children lived in a dormitory where they were closely monitored, controlled, and forbidden to speak Ukrainian.

“Children who came from Ukraine were not perceived as equals in Russia. They were under special supervision: they were monitored where they went, with whom they talked, what time they came home,” said the children’s mother.

They especially controlled the language the children spoke. The woman said:

“The attitude towards children was disgusting. If they spoke Ukrainian, it was something: they were called in, so to speak, “for a flogging.” They were told off, scolded, and told that their homeland was now Russia. They were pressured psychologically.”

The imposition of a rigid pan-Russian identity on Ukrainian children in Russian schools is a violation of numerous human rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, said Karim Asfari, a legal analyst at The Reckoning Project. 

“According to Article 8 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by the Russian Federation, states parties are obliged to respect the right of a child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family connections. Article 29 develops this idea in the educational context and recognises the importance of respect for the child’s mother tongue. States parties are obliged to educate children in a manner that takes into account, inter alia, their identity, language, values, and country of origin,” Asfari explained.

The convention also requires states parties to take into account the views of children in matters affecting them, giving them due consideration following the age and maturity of the child. When some Russian schools prohibit Ukrainian students from expressing their views and preserving their identity, this is a violation of Russia’s international obligations, the expert emphasised. Asfari said:

“Speaking about this particular case, these violations are aggravated by the maturity of the child and the clarity of her desire to get an education that corresponds to her identity and language.”

In the Russian city where the brother and sister were taken, there were many children from the village in the Luhansk region where they had been living before.

“There was no education in the village. Those who could be taken were taken to Russia. No one was taken to Ukraine, but they were taken to Russia to study there,” said the children’s mother.

The daughter communicated with her mother most actively. The son hardly ever shared details about his life in Russia.

“He is a taciturn boy. He used to say all the time: “Mom, I’m fine, everything will be fine.” My daughter communicated with him there. They lived not far from each other and supported each other. She said that it was very hard for him there. But he told me: “Mom, we are holding on. When the war is over, we will see you,” the woman said.

The son, who had already come of full age, eventually decided to stay in Russia, but the daughter did not want to stay. The mother tried to bring her home.

One day, the woman found a carrier from Lysychansk and asked him to take her daughter out of the Russian city. 

In September 2023, the carrier took the girl by bus from the dormitory where her brother lived and drove her to the EU border. However, the attempt to leave Russia was unsuccessful: the girl was not allowed to cross the border because she was unaccompanied by adults.

The mother could not come to Russia to pick up the child, so the driver returned the girl to the Russian city where she was studying.

The woman was in despair. A neighbour heard her crying and gave her the number of Ukrainian volunteers who protect children’s rights. 

They helped arrange the child’s departure from Russia. The girl told the volunteers that she wanted to go to her mother, that she was Ukrainian, and that she wanted to return to her homeland.

In October 2023, the girl left the dormitory with a small bag and documents. She took a train to another Russian city, changed trains and travelled to Belarus. In Minsk, accompanied by volunteers, the girl tried to cross the EU border but this time, she was not allowed to do so.

The volunteers took the girl, waited for a new shift at the border, and finally managed to send her to one of the EU countries.

A few days later, the girl arrived in Kyiv, where her mother met her. The return journey was very emotionally difficult for the child, she was worried that she would not be allowed to cross the border and would never see her mother. So in the first weeks after her return, the girl did not leave her mother’s side: she clung to her, trying to be with her every minute. 

However, her hardships were not over. Children who returned to the occupied village from Russia told her grandmother about her granddaughter’s escape. The elderly woman’s neighbours started to harass her, and she, in turn, called her granddaughter and said: “What have you done? It’s such a shame!”

The girl’s former classmates also started writing to her, insulting and condemning her.

According to her mother, the girl reacted to all of this very vehemently, shrinking into herself and crying.

“I told her: ‘These are strangers! These are Russians. They have no right to even speak to us! You don’t have to pay attention to the opinions of strangers.’ She quit that social media group and everything got better for her. Now she is studying, she has become calmer,” said the girl’s mother.

Now the child is studying remotely at the lyceum of Sievierodonetsk, where she studied before the full-scale war. Her brother is still in Russia. Recently, the children’s mother has started the process of terminating her ex-husband’s parental rights.

Natalka Sirobab, Yana Osadcha