The empty orphanages of Kherson

14/02/2023 -They arrived after midday, just as children in the Stepanivka center for social and psychological rehabilitation, in Kherson, were having lunch. Dressed in military fatigues and holding rifles, the Russian soldiers went into the building, led by a man reportedly from the FSB, Russia's secret police.

They entered the administration office and went through the children's files, computers and footage from the security cameras. That's when Volodymyr Sahaidak, the director, knew his fears of children being taken away were not unfounded. He had heard the stories of minors transferred into Russia since the start of the occupation of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, and now that Kherson had fallen, he worried about the fate of the youngsters under his care, according to an interview with Sky News. "We saw Russian propagandists saying that they needed to take the children to give them to military schools, indoctrinate them and let them fight for Russia," he said. "It was the scariest thing so we started hiding children because we understood they would take them."

Sahaidak started looking for ways to protect the 52 orphaned and vulnerable children under his care. He placed several of them away from the institution, with seven of his staff. Others were sent to live with distant relatives, and he kept some of the older ones with him.

After looking through the different areas of the building, the soldiers ended up not taking the remaining children in the center, but later brought a group of 15 other minors from elsewhere in Ukraine into the Stepanivka center. The staff took care of them, until one day the Russian forces came back, put the children in military vehicles and drove off without revealing their destination.

On 30 September 2022, Vladimir Putin triumphantly signed the annexation of four new regions into the Russian state: the Ukrainian occupied regions of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic, and the areas of Kherson and Zhaporizhia. Among the selected few attending the Kremlin event was Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's Children's Rights Commissioner. She promptly took to social media to officially welcome the children from these territories into the Russian state. “Children of the DPR, LPR, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions are now Russians. Congratulations, friends! We are happy to welcome you into our big family!”, she captioned a selfie from the event in her Telegram account.

But on the ground, fighting was still raging between Russia and Ukraine, and particularly in Kherson, where evacuations were being planned by Moscow. They prepared for an attack by Ukrainian forces looking to retake the area and the only regional capital Russia had been able to occupy since the start of the invasion. What happened at the local Oleskhy state care institution for disabled children there is an illustration of one of the ways in which children from boarding houses around Ukraine are transferred into Russian-controlled territory.

One week after the official annexation, on October 7, the pro-Russian administration of occupied Kherson issued an order appointing a new director of the Oleshky orphanage-boarding school, “to ensure social protection of children with persistent psycho-neurological diseases and physical disabilities”. According to Ukrainian authorities and press reports, there were 82 children in the institution, 40 of them under palliative care for serious illnesses or conditions.