The head of the Russian political party A Just Russia, Sergey Mironov, has secretly adopted and renamed a 10-month-old Ukrainian girl who was taken from the Kherson region while it was under Russian occupation last year, independent Russian website iStories has revealed.
Mironov reacted angrily to the allegations on Thursday without denying them, branding the iStories report a “fake story from the Ukrainian special services and their foreign supervisors” on Twitter.
“I’m used to information attacks. There’s only one goal behind all of this: to discredit those who today maintain their uncompromising patriotic stance. The truth will prevail no matter what. And Russia will see the special military operation through to total victory,” Mironov added.
According to data from independent Ukrainian news website Hromadske, the Russian-installed authorities gave their approval for Mironov’s wife Inna Varlamova and Russian State Duma Deputy Yana Lantratova to take two children from a Kherson orphanage — 10-month-old Margarita Prokopenko and two-year-old Ilya Vashchenko, iStories reported.
Both children were taken to Moscow to be “examined, treated, and rehabilitated”, after which Prokopenko was officially adopted by Varlamova and Mironov last December, becoming Marina Sergeyevna Mironova and a Russian citizen.
An iStories source with knowledge of events said that Prokopenko’s biological father was dead and her mother had been denied custody, although she did have other relatives. It is unknown who adopted Ilya Vashchenko, who only received a birth certificate in September, which says he is in the Moscow region.
In March, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova. Both are suspected of the unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, something Lvova-Belova confirmed in July when she said that over 700,000 Ukrainian children had been removed to Russia.
