25 Children Rescued from Russian Occupation in Kherson Region

A boy and a girl, aged 14 and 16, were evacuated from the still occupied left bank of Kherson region.

According to Oleksandr Prokudin, the head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, 25 children have been returned to the government-controlled territory since the beginning of this year. The rescue operations were made possible thanks to the implementation of the presidential initiative Bring Kids Back UA and the Save Ukraine charity foundation.

"Today, children and their families are recovering from the horrors of the Russian occupation. They are under the supervision of doctors and psychologists and receive all the necessary assistance," the official added.

Representatives of the Bring Kids Back UA initiative said that because of her Ukrainian citizenship, 14-year-old Kateryna could not receive medical care, as the occupiers refused to treat her and offered to change her citizenship to Russian. The girl's father was forced to sign a contract with the Russian army, threatening to take her and other children and send them to a camp. During her stay in the occupation, the girl suffered a nervous breakdown, after which she was assigned a "psychologist" from the FSB.

And 16-year-old Oleksiy was scolded at school for using Ukrainian letters in Russian words. Against his will, he was put on the military register, and some of his classmates were taken to the military commissariat, threatened with being taken to the army. His best friend and her family were deported.

Earlier, a 14-year-old boy who lived in a village on the left bank with his grandmother was returned from the temporarily occupied Kherson region to the territory controlled by Ukraine . His father was waiting for him on the free territory. Before that, a large family was returned from the occupation - a mother and her eight children aged 5 to 17.

Earlier, Intent wrote that there are about 1.5 million children in the temporarily occupied territories, all of whom are under the threat of deportation. According to Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, the re-education of Ukrainian teenagers and youth is very well integrated into the policy of the Russian Federation, and it is carried out by bodies of different levels - federal, regional, occupation and even Ukrainian collaborators.

Previously, the occupation authorities of the Kherson region forced children to tear up the graves of victims of Nazi mass shootings in 1941-1943 near Henichesk. The invaders called this involvement of schoolchildren in the exhumation of human remains"patriotic education." In addition to children, heavy machinery was also involved in the "search work," which could simply destroy the burial site.

Олеся Ланцман