Russian forces deported Bohdan Yermokhin from the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the spring of 2022, flew him to Moscow on a government plane and gave him to a foster family.
He was sent to a patriotic camp near the capital, where flag-waving staff praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and tried to teach him nationalist songs.
The Ukrainian teenager was given a Russian passport and sent to a Russian school. And then, in the fall of 2023, just before his 18th birthday, he received a call from a Russian military recruiting office.
Yermokhin, who is now back in Ukraine recovering from his ordeal in Kiev, told CNN he believed this was the latest step in Russia’s attempt to intimidate him into submission — an attempt to enlist him as a soldier to fight against of his people.
“(I was told that) Ukraine was losing, that children were being used for organ donation there, and that I would be immediately sent to war. I told them that if they sent me to war, at least I would fight for my country, not for them,” he said.
Yermokhin was part of a group of children known as the “Mariupol 31”, who were taken to Russia. Ukrainian authorities estimate that 20,000 children have been forcibly taken to Russia since Moscow began its invasion of the country in February 2022. More than 2,100 children are still missing, according to official statistics, but the government says the true number it can be much bigger.
“I was told that children were being used for organ donation there and that I would be sent to war immediately”
Last March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Russian Children’s Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their alleged role in the abduction and deportation of children from Ukraine. Russia has publicly acknowledged transporting unaccompanied children from Ukraine, despite the fact that some have guardians or parents.
Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, Dmytro Lubinets, said his office was convinced that Russia’s efforts to turn Ukrainian teenagers deported to Russia – or living in occupied eastern regions – into soldiers was part of a wider effort by Putin to erase the Ukrainian identity. It is also an opportunity for Moscow to replenish its forces on the front line.
“It’s not theoretical,” he said. “We now have examples of violent mobilization of Ukrainian people. “All Ukrainian teenagers detained in Russia, when they turn 18, are put on the (recruitment) list of the Russian army,” he told CNN.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, it is illegal under the Geneva Conventions for an occupying power to force or pressure the local population to serve in its armed forces. Human Rights Watch said Russia is committing a war crime in this way.
“We are losing children”
Many of the children deported to Russia came from socially vulnerable Ukrainian families. Some had been orphaned or placed in foster homes when their parents could not care for them.
It is these children that Mykola Kuleba is most concerned about. He heads Save Ukraine, a non-governmental organization based in Kyiv that specializes in the return of deported children to Ukraine.
“We’re losing these kids. Many of them will never come back because they grow up with this poison, with this horrible propaganda, they are very vulnerable to it,” he said.
Yermokhin said he saw it firsthand. He spent years living with foster families and in group homes after losing his parents as a toddler and was in a boarding school in Mariupol when Russian troops occupied the city in May 2022.
“Many of us were abandoned by our guardians, abandoned by foster parents during the war… and then the Russians come in and act in this hypocritical way, offering warmth and pretending to care, and these kids see that and think, well , this is better than it was there (in Ukraine),” Yermokhin said.
“If you look at history, the Russians did this (before), they also took children from Chechnya and now these children (now adults) are fighting for them,” Yermohkin said, referring to Russia’s wars to reclaim the breakaway republic of Chechnya in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Kuleba said there is no doubt that the deportations are part of a larger strategy. “It is a Russian strategy to turn Ukrainian children into Russian children and militarize them. They kidnap children and erase their identities, because they want to destroy the Ukrainian nation,” he said.
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