Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly raised the abducted children as a top prioriUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly raised the abducted children aKYIV, Ukraine — Armed with machine guns, balaclava-clad Russian soldiers burst into 16-year-old Vladislav Rudenko’s home in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine and gave him half an hour to gather some things.
“I was home alone. I packed my things in a panic,” the teenager told NBC News, describing the morning in October 2022, eight months after Russian forces captured the city, when he said the soldiers forced him to get into a car and drove away “in an unknown direction.”
It was the start of an eight-month nightmare as the teenager became part of a systematic effort by Russia to relocate and re-educate thousands of children from Ukraine, in some cases forcibly adopting them while sending others to military training camps.
At a meeting with President Donald Trump and several European leaders at the White House last month, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy raised the issue of Ukraine’s "abducted children.” His comments came three days after Trump met with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska for talks on ending the war.
While little progress has been made toward a ceasefire since then, Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine, a leading nongovernmental organization supporting people trying to secure the return of their children from Russia, insisted world leaders’ “focus must remain on children, not just land.”
Kuleba, whose organization says it has rescued more than 750 children from Russia and Ukrainian territories occupied by its forces, says the push for their removal and re-education came from the highest levels of the Kremlin.
The International Criminal Court has accused Putin of the war crime of overseeing the unlawful abduction and deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia, and in March 2023 it issued a warrant for his arrest. The ICC has also accused Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Putin’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights, of committing similar crimes.
“They force these kids to be Russian, to be Russian soldiers,” Kuleba said in a telephone interview last month, adding: “The Russian regime has a clear intention to annihilate Ukrainian identity.”
A Ukrainian artilleryman. Genya Savilov / AFP via Getty Images file
Russia’s Defense Ministry and Lvova-Belova’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on both Vlad’s abduction and the ICC arrest warrants.
Vlad said he was taken to two camps in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine and annexed in 2014, and later to a naval academy in the Kherson region occupied by Putin’s forces.
“They tried to break me in every possible way,” he said, adding that he was treated “very badly” and denied food in the first camp because he “began to show my pro-Ukrainian position.”s a top priority.ty.
