Investigation
RING OF EVIL
Inside Putin’s ring of child snatchers turning Ukrainian kids into ‘Russian zombies’ at Nazi-style ‘re-education camps’
KIDNAPPED Ukrainian kids are being sent to sinister "re-education camps" by Putin's evil child snatchers in a bid to turn them into "Russian zombies", according to a report.
Children inside the camps are said to have been put through the process of "information zombification" to rid them of their Ukrainian heritage and make them "pro-Russian."
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Last year, a Sun investigation revealed Vlad's crony Maria Lvova Belova had headed up an organisation tasked with putting kidnapped Ukrainian children into Russian homes.
Many children have been left orphaned or separated from their loved ones by Putin's ruthless invasion - meaning Belova's team of sick abductors have been free to sweep up innocent youngsters.
A member of the organisation, Into the Hands of Children, has now been linked to a neo-Nazi group, while another sponsored a chilling anti-LGBTQ bill, according to a report by the Ukrainian military investigations site .
The group have been able to illegally place children with adoptive families in 57 Russian regions.
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Those who assist Maria in bringing children into Russia give them citizenship and new names as part of the sick scheme - making the minors nearly impossible to trace.
The government is operating a large-scale systematic network of camps within occupied Crimea and Russia in order to house and process children, according to the report.
It identified 43 facilities in Ukraine and Russia where "ethnic cleansing" is taking place - although it's feared the number could be a lot higher.
According to experts at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, the sites serve to "re-educate"; youngsters from Ukrainian families to adopt pro-Russian views - while orphans are targeted for deportation to Russian territories.
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At every stage, the children are subjected to "information zombification" while being told they have been abandoned by their parents and bribed with sweets and gadgets.
Each child has a medical examination before being shipped off to Russia - a new process after it was discovered adoptive families had abandoned children if they were found to have an illness, the report states.
The Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova Belova, appointed by Putin himself, is the most highly involved figure in Russia’s deportation and adoption of Ukraine’s children, Yale University said.
She has even adopted a child, a 15-year-old boy named Philip, from Donbass herself and admitted on her own Telegram channel he "longed to go back to Ukraine" but now appreciates his "new home".
Fourteen members of her gang of child snatchers have been revealed while some appear to have some chilling connections.
Oleksiy Petrov, an advisor to the Children’s Rights Commissioner, has a Skype address that mentions the Russian neo-Nazi group, the Wotanjugend, reports claim.
According to an investigation at Bellingcat, The Wotanjugend organisation was described by its founder as a “mini-university for supporters of right-wing ideology”.
The group also describes the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people, and far-right terrorist Anders Brevik, who killed 77 in 2011, as heroes.
When the Russians learned that children were without parents, they came with a bus and took all those children somewhere
Marina Lypovetska
Another member, Nina Ostanina, the Head of the Committee on Family, Women and Children of the Russian Federation, was behind an anti-LGBQT bill back in July last year.
She co-sponsored the bill that would “ban the denial of family values” and the promotion of “non-traditional sexual orientation”.
She stated in an interview that “a traditional family is a union of a man and woman, it’s children, it’s a multi-generational family".
Another member, Vladimir Khromov, was seen giving a thumbs-up while posing with children alongside three Chechen henchmen in a disturbing image.
Moscow’s governor Andrey Vorobyov is also said to be responsible for giving Ukrainian children Russian citizenship, the report reveals.
A close ally to Sergei Shoigu, Andrey was sanctioned by the EU in December for his role in the Ukraine invasion.
Reports from occupied regions of Ukraine suggest parents are being forced to send their children to Russian camps - not knowing when they will return.
One mother, who had been told her daughter would return after three weeks, told Sky News: "We ask everyone to bring back our child… I don't know how she will be feeling right now.
"Nobody knew it would be so difficult to get her back."
Distressed mothers also told the how they were pressured to send their kids to the summer camps and then lost contact with them for months.
Single mum Tatiana Vlaiko from Kherson said she was forced to send her 11-year-old daughter Lilya to a two-week summer camp in Moscow-annexed Crimea in September.
Young Lily spoke of fun activities but Tatiana was alarmed when her daughter mentioned everything was in Russian and the kids were forced to sing the Russian national anthem every day.
She was later told Lily had been moved to a different camp.
And despite her efforts to contact her daughter's teacher, she could not find out where her daughter was.
In a similar situation was Lyudmila Motychak, 44 who lost contact with her daughter Anastasia, 15, after she was sent on a school trip to a "health camp in Crimea".
The mum said the teen described in tears the horrid living conditions at the camp over the phone.
With the help of the Save Ukraine organisation, Tatiana and Lyudmila were eventually able to travel to Crimea alongside other parents and reunite with their kids nearly four months later.
Others haven't been so lucky and are still searching for their children.
RING OF EVIL
The camps draw shocking parallels to events during WW2 when 200,000 Polish children were taken to Germany as part of Heinrich Himmler’s "Germanization programme".
"Aryan-looking" children who appeared adequately German were moved over the border where they were given new names in a bid to eradicate the Polish population.
Under the 1948 Geneva convention, forcibly transferring children and changing that child's nationality or civil status is considered a war crime.
But it seems war-mad Putin is happy to parade his war crimes under the guise that Russia is saving Ukrainian children from their war-torn country and placing them with "happy" families.
On the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion, the Kremlin brought children from the bombed-out region of Mariupol on stage at a pro-Russia rally in Moscow.
The kids thanked their kidnappers at the Luzhniki Stadium as part of a sick performance to convince the world that youngsters had been rescued.
One of the young girls, known as Anna, turned to a Russian soldier during the rally and said: "Thank you Uncle Yura for saving me, my sister and hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol."
Anna, along with her sister Karolina and other children then gather around to hug "Uncle Yura" in a seemingly staged moment.
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Reports from Anna’s home town suggest her mother, blogger Olga Naumenko, was killed by shrapnel from an explosion and had left behind three children, The Guardian reported.
Since the beginning of Putin's ruthless invasions, thousands of civilians have died while others have been forcibly mobilised into the Russian army.
Official Russian sources state that 300,000 children have been forcibly taken over the border while Ukrainian authorities fear the number could be as high as 700,000.
But Belova claimed only 2,000 have been deported since the start of the war.
The Hands of Children are tasked with finding “orphaned children” or children “whose parents have been deprived of parental rights” before being taken to deportation centres.
Russian families wanting to take in children are required to take part in training which delves into “the intricacies of the ideological upbringing of Ukrainian children”.
Whilst the child’s surname and first name are also changed to match that of their Russian family making them difficult to trace, according to.
SUN INVESTIGATION
In September last year, as part of a Sun Investigation, we spoke to grandmother Tatyana Tolstokorova after her granddaughter had vanished during Russian shelling.
The family's apartment was blown to bits. But when Tatyana, 55, failed to find the remains of her loved ones in the rubble in Mariupol - it raised horrifying questions.
The gran spent months searching for Pavel, Olga and Nastya in the hopes that they’d escaped unscathed but was stunned when a clip of a young Ukrainian girl appeared online.
It showed orphaned children being introduced to their new adoptive parents in Russia but a girl wearing a frilly purple dress caught her eye - she was sure it was Nastya.
The clip gave Tatyana a glimmer of hope that she had survived the shelling but she would now have to take on Russian authorities to prove the young girl’s real identity.
The Sun spoke with Marina Lypovetska, Head of Missing Children’s Service in Kyiv, for NGO Magnolia - an organisation that offers a hotline for missing children and information.
She believes the numbers are far more shocking and that it could be hard to work out exact figures due to the lack of information from occupied territories.
She said: “We have online channels where citizens can write to us but it is very difficult for them and very dangerous.
“So I think the most worrying situation is the occupied territories, we don’t have access to the information.”
Marina says that the charity recently spoke with a teacher in Mariupol who said a group of orphaned children had been discovered in a bomb shelter and loaded onto a bus by Russian forces.
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She said: “When the Russians learned that the children were without parents, they came with a bus and took all those children somewhere.
“There is no information where, but they took all those children who hiding underground and their destiny is unknown."
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