Agony of Ukrainian parents trapped in Russian territory who are forced to choose one child to hand over to Putin’s ‘summer camps’ or face losing them all, writes IAN BIRRELL

Russia is using a deterrent tactic against Ukrainians trapped in occupied territories, demanding a “tax” from parents who must give up one of their children.

Officials are telling parents to select a child to send to their network of sinister “summer camps,” which are being used to kidnap large numbers of Ukrainian boys and girls for adoption as part of the Kremlin’s genocidal strategy to destroy the country.

According to a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, families who refuse to comply are threatened with the loss of parental rights over all their children and warned: “You will never see them again.”

The gruesome revelation comes as Kiev is helping to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin and his adviser Maria Lvova-Belova, the architect of their child sex crimes, for war crimes at the International Criminal Court.

Daria Herasymchuk, Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights and rehabilitation, says Moscow has been holding captive children in so-called summer camps for nearly a year. These camps consist of industrial-style buildings with no windows.

She says many families refused to send their children to this network of camps in Russia, but were threatened and coerced into cooperation by Kremlin officials and their cronies in the territories captured by Putin.

She said: ‘In some occupied areas it seems that the local population paid a so-called tax with their children. The authorities come to the family and say: ‘We know that your family has four children, so you have to send one child to the camp. You choose which one.’

“If the parents say no, they threaten them and say, ‘We will take away all your parental rights and we will take all your children and you will never see them again. So you have to decide who goes to the camp.'”

A 15-year-old from the Kharkiv region told her that he was held in a camp for nine months after his father was suspected of helping Ukrainian troops and was tortured in a basement. The teenager was eventually retrieved by his mother with the help of Kiev.

Russia is using a scare tactic against Ukrainians trapped in occupied territories by demanding a ‘tax’ from parents that means they must give up one of their children to Putin’s ‘summer camps’

“The boy was taken to what the Russians call a summer camp, but it was actually a huge hangar, a kind of warehouse, with no windows, where 15 of them were kept,” Ms. Herasymchuk said. “They were allowed out once a day for a little walk, but otherwise they were locked up. They had only bunk beds, nothing else.

“This young man would say it was a prison sentence – and the boy’s eyes are in great pain as he tells this story.”

Russia claims to have “rescued” 744,000 Ukrainian children. Kiev has confirmed 20,000 cases of child abductions, but fears that as many as 300,000 youngsters have been abducted by the Kremlin.

Ms Herasymchuk said they are first taken to areas of Donetsk captured in 2014, where they are given Russian passports and phones. They are then transferred to foster families in far-flung places such as Siberia, where they can quickly integrate into their societies.

She has discovered a range of Russian methods for seizing their children: taking those who lost their parents in the invasion; stealing those who live in state institutions; taking them during “filtration” at the borders; and taking them as punishment for families deemed loyal to Ukraine.

Avaaz members and the Ukrainian diaspora placed mobile billboards at the United Nations headquarters in New York in February 2023 to denounce Putin’s kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children

She said many of these children – even those who lost both parents in the fighting – had siblings or other relatives, but “they immediately deprived these children of the opportunity to have contact with family members.”

Rescued children say they are given compulsory Russian citizenship lessons and forced to sing the national anthem, then beaten and bullied if they continue to show sympathy for Ukraine.

One teenage returnee told me that his foster family “tried to convert me into a good Russian,” while insisting that Ukraine was the enemy. “But I’m not crazy,” he said. “I would fight.” Such resistance is risky. There are documented cases of Russian draft papers being issued to Ukrainians when they turn 18, forcing them to fight against their own country.

Thousands have been separated from their families through the use of the camps. Parents are persuaded or coerced to send their children away for a few weeks – then officials claim it is too dangerous to send them back, while they spend months intensively brainwashing them against their parents and their country.

The camps can be up to 5,000 miles from home, making it difficult and expensive for poorer Ukrainians living under occupation to return.

“And then the organizers ask, ‘Why isn’t your mother coming? Maybe she doesn’t like you, maybe she sent you to this camp because she doesn’t need you,'” Ms. Herasymchuk said.

Local officials separated friends to further isolate the stolen children as they continued their indoctrination efforts, leaving even older teens “torn apart and sometimes thinking their parents wouldn’t take them back,” she said.

In another sickening twist, Ukraine is investigating claims that some children were abducted after doctors diagnosed mysterious illnesses and demanded they be taken for emergency treatment.

Ms Herasymchuk said it was clear that the Kremlin had carefully prepared methods to brainwash them. “This is why we are talking about genocide – the only reason children are suffering is because they were Ukrainian,” she said.

Additional reporting: Kate Baklitskaya