Another 31 children previously illegally deported to Russia have been returned to Ukraine, Ukrainian news agency UNIAN reports, citing CEO of Save Ukraine Mykola Kuleba.
“This was our fifth rescue mission, and this one was special not only because of the number of children we rescued but also because of the difficulty of the operation. Unfortunately, a grandmother that was supposed to take her two grandchildren died while the mission was being conducted,” Kuleba said. He added that because of that they were only able to return 31 children instead of 33.
According to the CEO of Save Ukraine, Russians were keeping the children behind a fence, letting one parent in the building at a time. There were cameras installed in the building.
“All the children that have been returned say that no one was in any way trying to locate their parents. We looked for these children, which was a very difficult task, because there are children that have been moved across five different locations in five months — they were thrown from one camp to another. There’s a lot of proof of what was happening to the children there,” Kuleba added.
At the end of March, UNIAN reported that Ukraine had information on 19,514 children illegally deported to Russia, over 4,000 orphans among them.
In March, 17 children from the Kherson and Kharkiv regions that had been deported to Russia or occupied territories last year returned to Ukraine.
