Putin’s thugs prowl Ukrainian orphanage for children to abduct and turn into soldiers, CCTV shows
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Russian FSB agents and armed soldiers have raided a Ukrainian orphanage to kidnap children and send them to Moscow, chilling CCTV footage shows.
Ukrainian intelligence claims that a staggering 13,000 orphans as young as toddlers have been kidnapped and sent to Russia, where they are indoctrinated with pro-Kremlin war propaganda.
Volodymyr Sahaidak is the director of an orphanage near Kherson, an area that was previously under Russian control before a surprising Ukrainian reaction forced a withdrawal.
He decided to hide the 52 orphans in his care when he learned that Putin’s thugs were advancing, sending them to local families who took them in despite the risk of being arrested or shot.
Russian FSB agents and armed soldiers have raided a Ukrainian orphanage to kidnap children and send them to Moscow, chilling CCTV footage shows.
CCTV footage at the orphanage then shows rifle-wielding Russian agents and fighters arriving to find it completely empty, instead raiding their files and computers in hopes of finding information about where they were hiding.
Sahaidak said sky news: ‘We saw Russian propagandists say that they need to take orphans to put them in military schools, indoctrinate them and let them fight for Russia.
“It was the scariest thing, so we started hiding the children because we understood they were going to be taken away.”
Local families took in up to four orphans each to keep them safe during the Russian occupation, and the invading forces never found them.
“It seemed that if I didn’t hide my children, they would just be taken from me,” Sahaidak said.
CCTV footage at the orphanage then shows rifle-wielding Russian agents and fighters arriving to find it completely empty.
Local families took in up to four orphans each to keep them safe during the Russian occupation.
But with the orphanage now on Russian soil, Vladimir Putin’s troops sent 15 children captured from other parts of Ukraine there, before taking them to Russia when they were forced into their humiliating retreat.
An orphanage teacher, Oxana, said the terrified children were loaded into military vehicles by soldiers with machine guns.
Natalya Kadyrova, who lives next door to another orphanage in Kherson, said she saw children as young as three years old torn from their place of sanctuary, despite the fact that kidnapping children is a serious violation of the rules of war.
The Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said 48 orphans between the ages of three and five were taken from this Kherson orphanage and opened an investigation involving its secret service.
Just hours after Putin launched his savage invasion in February, health staff at a children’s hospital in the south began secretly planning how to save the babies.
Hospital staff care for orphaned children in the maternity ward of the regional children’s hospital in Kherson, southern Ukraine.
During the war in Ukraine, the Russian authorities have been accused of deporting Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-controlled territories to raise as their own.
Caretakers at a regional children’s hospital in Kherson began falsifying orphans’ medical records to make it appear they were too sick to move.
“We deliberately wrote false information that the children were sick and could not be transported,” said Dr. Olga Pilyarska, head of intensive care.
“We were afraid that (the Russians) would find out… (but) we decided that we would save the children at all costs.”
The The whereabouts of most of the abducted children are still unknown.
At the Kherson hospital, staff made up illnesses for 11 abandoned babies in their care, so they wouldn’t have to hand them over to the orphanage where they knew they would be given Russian documents and possibly taken away.
One baby had “pulmonary bleeding,” another “uncontrollable seizures” and another needed “artificial ventilation,” Pilyarska said of the false records.
Toys and a doll lay on the floor of a playhouse in the courtyard of the Kherson Regional Children’s Home in Kherson
Earlier this year, it was reported that Russia is trying to give thousands of Ukrainian children to Russian families for foster care or adoption.
Officials deported Ukrainian children to Russia or Russian-controlled territories without consent, lied to them that their parents didn’t want them, used them for propaganda, and gave them Russian families and citizenship.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, says Russian officials are carrying out a deliberate depopulation campaign in occupied parts of Ukraine and deporting children under the guise of medical rehabilitation plans and adoption programs.
Russian authorities have repeatedly said that transferring children to Russia is aimed at protecting them from hostilities.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has rejected claims that the country is confiscating and deporting the children.
He says authorities are looking for relatives of parentless children left behind in Ukraine to find opportunities to send them home where possible.
Volodymyr Zelensky claimed in October that more than 1.6 million of its citizens were deported during the war, many stripped of all documents and then dispersed across Russia. “They are robbing people,” he said.