Ukraine has returned a 17-year-old teenager from a college in temporarily occupied Mariupol. It took a month to return the boy home.
Ukraine brought home another child
Reportedly, about a month ago, the director of the Mariupol Professional Construction College, Anton Bilai, approached the Ministry of Reintegration. He asked for help to take 17-year-old Mykhailo out of the occupation.
It is noted that Bilay already has experience — he had previously managed to bring two orphaned students to the territory controlled by Ukraine. Despite the danger to himself, he personally followed them to the temporarily occupied Donetsk.
This time, as soon as he found out about the whereabouts of another boy, he immediately decided to contact the Ministry of Reintegration and the Ukrainian Child Rights Network.
It took about a month before Mykhailo returned. Now he is in Khmelnytskyi. His sister also lives there. His dream has come true, as he wanted to start his adult life in a free Ukraine, the Ministry of Reintegration said.
What is known about the abduction of Ukrainian children
On the occasion of Children's Day in 2023, the Online.UA team presented the documentary project "Abducted Childhood", which tells the stories of Ukrainian children who were forcibly deported and abducted to Russia.
In the "Abducted Childhood" film, children and their parents openly share their stories: some of them have been in captivity, some have been forcibly taken to a "rehabilitation camp", and some have been separated from their parents during so-called filtration measures.
It is essential to understand that in more than a year and a half of full-scale war, Ukraine has managed to return less than 400 children. At the same time, Russia claims to have "evacuated" 744,000 Ukrainian children.
Since diplomacy with the aggressor country is not working, Russia continues to take children from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine illegally.
However, this is not an evacuation, as the Russians claim, but a mass abduction of underage Ukrainian citizens.
The project documents the testimonies of children about war crimes committed by Russia against the Ukrainian people.
