Thousands of Ukrainian children relocated to Russia are at risk of losing their cultural heritage, a new report from The Guardian claims. Somewhere between 20,000 and 700,000 Ukrainian children have been relocated from their homes to Russia or Russian-occupied territories, often involuntarily, and put under a program aimed at erasing their emotional and psychological ties to Ukraine. “Every day they said to me that I would be staying here for ever and would never leave Russia,” one Ukrainian child told The Guardian, recounting more than a year in Russian custody. “They told me that Ukraine doesn’t exist, that it never existed, that we’re all Russians … At times the other kids would beat me for being pro-Ukrainian.” Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Andriy Kostin, claimed that Russia’s action constituted the largest mass deportation of children in Europe since World War II. He said Russia was trying to destroy Ukraine by “severing familial bonds and erasing the Ukrainian identity of the deported children.” Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s first lady, has called for international help to bring them home.
