Daria Herasymchuk, Zelensky’s chosen to recover minors stolen by Russia: “We know that there are at least 16,000 kidnapped children”

(Ukraine. Special envoys)- Daria Herasymchuk sighs. He raises his hands forward, as if wiping water from his fingers before grabbing something, then goes to respond. “It’s a very difficult question for me,” he said. And he continues: “Why did President Zelensky choose me for this task? Well, I’ve worked for children for a long time. My own son has a disability and I feel I have a mission to contribute. And now, with the war, I work so that all the children of the country can be in Ukraine, where they belong”.

Chosen by President Zelensky himself, Daria Herasymchuk is in charge of Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for Children’s Rights and Rehabilitation. When he took office, his job was very different from today: he had to protect and help the most vulnerable child population in the country. With the start of the war, everything changed: today, he is in charge of recovering children illegally transferred to Russia.

The numbers are unclear but even the most cautious versions are scary. Official Ukrainian sources speak of the fact that there are 16,000 children confirmed that they were stolen by Russia and are now in this country. From them, until the end of this note they had only managed to recover 307, but there are ongoing (and secret) negotiations being conducted by Daria.

His office is inside a large Soviet building located in a huge complex in kyiv. From there he has video calls, interviews, work meetings with the Presidency team. She does not come out of there for long hours of the day, immersed in the magnitude of her task. Right there, before this exclusive interview with GlobeLiveMediamoved back Argentinian pilot and philanthropist Enrique Piñeyro, arrived in the capital of Ukraine to work on aid projects to the country through his NGO, Solidaire, with which he has already carried out more than 15 humanitarian flights carrying donations or transporting refugees. Now he has offered his plane to Herasymchuk To facilitate the return of the children: pick them up where necessary and bring them back to Ukraine.

However, the counselor’s main challenge before moving the children is picking them up. It’s that thousands of them were taken by Russia and the Putin government shows no willingness to return them.

“Today the official number of children who died in war is 461″, said Herasymchuk. And he adds: “But this is not the final figure, which we know will be higher, because we are still looking for a lot. There are children that we have not yet identified… On the other hand , the number of children injured today is 927. But at the same time, every child in the country is psychologically hurt in one way or another. We are talking about 7 million children. Everything that happens to children in this war is an act of genocide against our people.“, define.

In recent weeks, a foreign report has accompanied some of the complaints made by the Ukrainian government on this subject. There Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Laboratory (HRL) (an American think tank), published an article in February in which it claimed that at least 6,000 Ukrainian children had been taken to Russian training centers. In turn, he identified 43 complexes where the concentration of children occurs. Although the Russian authorities have not made an official statement, the report assures that at least 32 of these centers are intended for political re-education of children. According to the report’s findings, all levels of Kremlin-led government would be involved, from municipal to federal.

– Can you speak with certainty about the number of children abducted by Russia or are these speculative figures?

-Confirmed, there are 16,221 Ukrainian children who were deported to Russia and kidnapped there. Our job is to get them back, and we try hard. But apart from these data, we know that the total number of children who were taken to Russia after the occupation of the various territories is much higher, but since we still do not have confirmation or we do not have received the complaint or we may not enter the occupied territories by checking it, we don’t know what the actual final number is. Today we estimate that between 100,000 and 200,000 children were crossed to the Russian border from Ukraine, and that might be appropriate.

What are the Russian authorities saying?

-Russian propaganda says that they are saving children, and they themselves in their own media speak of 738,000 children. We know that physically, because of the territory they occupy, they cannot reach this number of children. But we don’t understand where they get these numbers from. We try to list these children as soon as possible, because we understand that they give false information.

– Are all these children alone in Russia? Separated from parents?

-There are very different cases, but most of the time yes. In some cases, children are separated from their parents. because when they cross them at the border, the families pass through a filter and the parents can find themselves on one side, and the children on the other.

-There are many theories about what is going on with these children. There is talk of “re-education camps” inside Russia. Do they know exactly where they are taking them?

– This is a fundamental question. When the Russians entered Ukraine, they already knew what they were going to do with the children, it’s not as if they had improvised. It’s something we already know because when was the annexation of Crimea they invented a “train of hope” which came from Russia to Ukraine, to Crimea, to adopt Ukrainian children. It was something illegal, but they called it “the hope train”.

How are the credits going?

-They have their own methods of appropriating children. So far, since the beginning of the war, we have already managed to recover and bring back 307 children, and we have started to study from there how Russian methods of child abduction work. We discovered that there are five ways to do it, i.e. five scenarios. The first scenario occurs when they have already killed the parents and, already orphans, they kidnap them. The second scenario is cWhen families pass through filtration centers at the border, they separate the parents from the children there and take them. The third scenario is when they occupy a city, they say they are the authority and invent laws on the basis of which they take children away from their parents saying the boys can’t live in those conditions, and they take them away. The fourth case is when they invent rehabilitation camps, they take the boys out of the houses and take them to these so-called camps, but for that they force the parents to sign an authorization slip. This just happened in Kharkiv, in Kherson, in various fields. This is one of the most used methods. And what they do after they take them is they start moving them from one rehab camp to another, all in Russia. That way they never come back… And The last way they have of appropriating children is when they take them straight out of orphanages.

– I understand that they have ongoing negotiations to get the boys back. Who do we talk to in Russia? Who are the interlocutors?

– It has never happened once that Russia voluntarily sends back a child saying he made a mistake or whatever. Never. They have never voluntarily returned a child. The only person who can communicate between here and there, failed to achieve effective negotiation. All recovery success cases were case specific.

-In cases where they were successful, how did it work? How did they do it?

-I can not tell. If we were only talking about one of the recovery mechanisms, it would immediately stop working. But we will fight for every Ukrainian child to return home, because for us and for any country in the world, children are their future, their greatest treasure.

– Do you have any trace of children already assigned to a family in Russia?

-We have a total register in which we keep the complaints of all parents or other relatives who request for each child. All of this documentation is concentrated and we are working with it, but I cannot reveal anything as it would betray and complicate our recovery attempts.

-Why did President Zelensky choose you for this task? Or why you think he chose her, at least.

It’s a really difficult question. A year and a half ago, the president offered me to work in this position, in the Commission for the Rights and Rehabilitation of Children, I had no doubts because all my life I have worked for and for the children. My own son is disabled and I work so that all children in the country can be in Ukraine. I coordinate the work of various ministries in relation to this issue, and this articulation is also very important. What has changed this year is that we had a lot more work because here we also deal with the rehabilitation of children who suffer from a problem, and the number of children who need rehabilitation with all the attacks has increased enormously. We have to get the children back in Russia, but we also have to help those who are here so they can recover from what they’ve been through.

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