Latest news with #SaveUkraine
Globe and Mail
29-05-2025
- General
- Globe and Mail
Satellite data sheds light on Russia's modern-day gulags for Ukrainian children
The maps and data tracking this activity are generated by Hala Systems, a Lisbon-based technology company that received a $2-million grant from Global Affairs Canada to provide high-tech assistance to Save Ukraine, a Ukrainian organization working with sources inside Russia and the occupied territories to help bring the children home. They were shared exclusively with The Globe and Mail with the intent of raising awareness about what is widely considered to be an ongoing war crime. The effort has also revealed what appears to be evidence of something even more sinister happening to a number of the missing and abducted children, some as young as eight. Hala has identified six of the facilities in the network as bases for Russia's 'Yunarmiya,' or Youth Army. Analysts at Hala see proof that an unknown number of Ukrainian teenage boys are being given military training and instilled with anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western propaganda. The likely next step would see them assigned to Russia's regular armed forces to fight against their own country. Mykola Kuleba, the co-founder and head of Save Ukraine, said the network of detention camps for Ukrainian children is reminiscent of the Soviet gulags. 'It's very similar – there's an Iron Curtain now over the occupied territories, and they can do what they want with the civilians, with the Ukrainians there, and the children,' he said in an interview. 'It's very similar to the gulags, but with different goals. In the gulags, they massively killed Ukrainians who did not obey the regime. Today, they massively indoctrinate Ukrainian children to turn them into Russian children.' Unlawful conscription, such as forcing a civilian to fight against their own country, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as is the use of child soldiers. Mozhem Obyasnit, a Russian news outlet funded by opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, reported last month that Yunarmiya's budget had been doubled to one billion rubles (about US$11-million) for 2025. 'We have seen some children as young as eight that are being sent into very structured military patriotic programs,' said Ashley Jordana, Hala's director of law, policy and human rights. Much of the evidence, she said, was in the testimony of survivors who were rescued by Save Ukraine, as well as photographs of the youth camps that were published by Kremlin-controlled media outlets proudly reporting on the 'patriotic' re-education that Ukrainian children were receiving in the five regions of Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed. 'There's no shortage of testimony of children who are being indoctrinated and who are being forced to participate in the youth army,' Ms. Jordana said. The full network of centres where Ukrainian children are being held sprawls from the occupied areas of southern and eastern Ukraine all the way to a facility in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, more than 3,300 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. The map lays out where many of the 20,000 Ukrainian children who have been officially reported as missing – a number that both Hala and Save Ukraine view as the very minimum – have been taken since their homes fell under Russian occupation. Mr. Kuleba said Hala's technology has helped his organization locate, establish communications with, and eventually rescue 129 children since the Canadian-funded project began last summer. The fate of many more Ukrainian children remains in jeopardy. The number being trained for, or already serving in, the Russian army is difficult to estimate, Mr. Kuleba said, 'because this process is constant, of recruiting Ukrainians in occupied territories.' But all Ukrainians living in occupied areas had been forced to take Russian passports, making all males – even those younger than 18 – vulnerable to conscription. Interviews with survivors, Mr. Kuleba said, revealed that 'all boys, especially those who live in occupied territories, clearly understand they could be taken to the Russian army any time.' Ukraine's children, he said, were being treated as 'spoils of war' by Mr. Putin, who used the deported children to both replenish the ranks of his military and to alleviate Russia's wider demographic crisis. In some of the images produced by Hala Systems, little blue dots can be seen clustering in rooms inside the facilities, and sometimes moving in what appears to be military formation. Each blue dot represents the mobile phone of either a Ukrainian child or one of the Russians guarding them. Ms. Jordana said it's Hala's assessment – based on a study of the movements of the mobile phones located with the Yunarmiya bases, as well as the testimonies of survivors – that the cadets are awakened at 6 a.m. each day. They receive a canteen breakfast of eggs and oatmeal before being sent on to classes that include firearms assembly and use, mine clearance and military tactics. In the afternoons, the cadets are sometimes sent into the field to put their military skills to use in mock-combat situations. One satellite photograph shared with The Globe appears to show trenches dug in the yard of the Yunarmiya base in the occupied Ukrainian city of Melitopol. 'If states knew how much time and effort and resources Russia was putting into mobilizing and training a new generation of what are now children as eventual soldiers, I think that there would be a lot more concern,' Ms. Jordana said. Ms. Jordana, a 40-year lawyer from Ancaster, Ont., who is now based in Barcelona, has served as both a legal advisor to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and as a member of the defence team at the trial of Jovica Stanisic, a key henchman of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. A UN tribunal found Mr. Stanisic guilty of war crimes, including the forced transfer of non-Serbs from parts of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and sentenced him to 15 years in jail. Now Ms. Jordana hopes she is helping build the case for a future trial of Mr. Putin and those who followed his orders. 'A lot of what we do now, it's not just useful for Save Ukraine,' she said. 'The information gets sent to the regional prosecutors, the Office of the Prosecutor General, to the ICC, and National Police of Ukraine.' The maps of the facilities where Ukrainian children are being held were built by aggregating and analyzing what Hala calls 'open source' information, but require sophisticated technology to access and assemble. The first and most important source of information are the testimonies provided by those children and teens who managed to escape with the help of Save Ukraine. That gave Hala and Save Ukraine a starting point, allowing them to zoom in on suspected locations using satellite cameras. Many of the Ukrainian children and teens also appear to have mobile phones, a somewhat surprising development that allowed Hala and Save Ukraine to track groups – while also allowing the Russians to monitor the children's communications and social media postings, too. Deeper profiles of the facilities, and the Russians working there – whom Ms. Jordana refers to as 'the perpetrators' – was done by tracking the movements of mobile phones belonging to those involved in the network. 'In a few cases, we followed the truck drivers. We knew they stopped at certain gas station locations,' she explained, referring to specific drivers that were involved in the movement of the Ukrainian children, as well as supplies for the network of Russian camps. 'Once you understand the mapping and the networks, you can apply change-detection capabilities so that you're actually alerted beforehand for activity that might be interesting for you.' Additional information was gathered via social media – using bots developed by Hala Systems that combed the Telegram feeds of Ms. Lvova-Belova, among others, for tidbits about where the Russians were taking kidnapped Ukrainian children – as well as radio communications on unencrypted channels gathered via a network of sensors Hala has set up around Ukraine. Eventually, Ms. Jordana said, Hala was gathering so much data that it was able to spot the creation of new youth camps before the Russians started moving children into them. The work by Hala Systems has become even more important since March, when the U.S. government slashed most foreign aid programs. Among the cuts was funding to a research project by Yale University that built a database tracking the whereabouts some 35,000 Ukrainian children who had been illegally adopted by Russian families since the start of the war. Mr. Kuleba said the Trump administration's decision to pull funding from the Yale project sent a 'dangerous message' that the U.S. government no longer cared about the fate of those children, or prosecuting those who had committed crimes against them. Mr. Kuleba said Yale's database included more victims than the 20,000 figure used by the Ukrainian government because the latter figure covers only those who have been officially reported as missing by their families. Yale's list included orphans as well as children whose parents or guardians never reported their disappearances. (Ms. Jordana suggested some parents and guardians may be worried they could face punishment after intentionally sending children to schools and summer camps in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, believing the children would be safer on that side of the front line.) Save Ukraine, Mr. Kuleba said, counts all 1.6 million Ukrainian children who now live in areas controlled by the Russian military as victims who should be given the chance to return to Ukraine. Mr. Kuleba praised Canada for continuing to support the effort to bring Ukraine's children home. 'For us, it's very valuable to hear that Canada understands us. That they understand how every innocent child's life is valuable,' Mr. Kuleba said. The year-long Canadian government grant that funded Hala's work with Save Ukraine expires in September. It's not the first time Ottawa has turned to Hala Systems to help it advance a foreign policy aim. During Syria's 13-year civil war, Hala used open-source technology to develop an app called Sentry that would track the takeoffs and trajectory of Syrian government warplanes and then send a warning to the mobile phones of civilians living in their paths. Sentry was partially developed with funding from Global Affairs Canada, though John Jaeger, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Hala Systems, said Canada gradually stepped back from its leading role in supporting the work as Syria became 'less popular' with not just Canada but donors around the world. Still, Hala's successes in Syria laid the groundwork for the partnership in Ukraine. 'I'm sure it's helpful that we've passed audits and have put Canadian money to work responsibly and with impact,' Mr. Jaeger said. For Ms. Jordana, coming from the slow-moving world of international justice, it was an awakening to see how technology could accelerate the process of gathering evidence. But she also had to bring her legal eye to the work, helping draft a 187-page manual for how to treat evidence, such as scratchy radio intercepts, so that it remains admissible in any future court proceeding. 'Ninety per cent of my job is translating what Hala is doing to individuals that can make use of it and apply it to their space,' she said. 'But tech companies also have a lot to learn from the human rights sector, who base their practices in harm mitigation and very transparent type of practices. So, the lessons sort of go both ways, I think.' While Ms. Jordana said she hopes that the material she and her team are compiling will one day end up as part of war crimes trials related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that goal remains secondary to the immediate mission of trying to rescue the unknown number of children trapped in the 136 facilities that make up Mr. Putin's new gulag archipelago. 'How many Ukrainian children are still in Russia? Where are they? What happened to them? Are they safe? How many of them need to escape?' Mr. Kuleba said. 'This is a war for our children.' After Russians forces invaded Kharkiv, Ksenia Koldin and her brother, Serhiy, ended up on opposite sides of a new Iron Curtain. In 2023, The Ukrainian teen told The Globe how she rescued Serhiy from a Russian summer camp, a new foster family and the indoctrination he faced. Mark MacKinnon shared her story with The Decibel. Subscribe for more episodes. Anita Anand's Foreign Affairs gig gets praise from Kyiv A Ukrainian graphite mine shows how Trump may be overestimating how much he can get from the war-torn country 'What ceasefire?' Moscow's talk of peace faces incredulity in Kyiv
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Eleven Ukrainian children evacuated from occupation, including daughter of Azovstal defender freed after three years in captivity
Eleven children have been brought from Russian-occupied territories to areas under Ukrainian control, among them two orphans and children of Ukrainian service members. Source: Ukrainian charitable organisation Save Ukraine Anatolii, a teenage orphan, was among those evacuated from the temporarily occupied territories. He had suffered physical abuse at the hands of Russian soldiers after he found bullets in the forest. Anatolii was abducted in the middle of a school lesson, a bag was put over his head in the headteacher's office, his hands were tied and he was taken to a basement. A week before his 18th birthday, he received a summons for conscription into Russian forces. Another evacuee was Ostap, who had not seen his family for three years. His father serves in the Ukrainian Armed Forces and his older brother has spent 1,111 days in Russian captivity. Among those rescued was the daughter of a female Azov defender. The girl's mother, Marharyta, and older brother spent three years in Russian captivity. Back in 2022, Marharyta and her son had left the Azovstal steel plant together without knowing what had happened to each other until their release in April 2025. Quote from Save Ukraine: "During the prisoner exchange, Marharyta accidentally encountered her son on the bus. But she had one more dream – to see her little girl again, who had remained in occupation as a baby. Today, that dream has come true: the mother is finally reunited with her children and still can't believe it's not a dream." Read more: Separated by war: Ukrainian soldier reunited with daughter after release from Russian captivity Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Yahoo
"Didn't step outside for nearly three years": Nine children brought back from Russian-occupied territories
Ukraine has brought back nine more children from territories temporarily occupied by Russia. Their families have endured severe hardship. Source: Bring Kids Back UA and Save Ukraine Details: Among those rescued were sisters Ilona and Tamila (names changed for safety reasons). For nearly three years, the girls did not leave their home or speak with other children, as their school and kindergarten were destroyed within the first six months of the full-scale invasion. Their childhood was overshadowed by constant bombardments, the movement of armoured vehicles and encounters with drunk Russian soldiers roaming the streets. Seventeen-year-old Yevheniia nearly died due to the lack of proper medical care in the occupied territories – ambulances no longer responded to calls, and hospitals lacked diagnostic equipment. "As a result, she was only correctly diagnosed during an emergency surgery. It is unclear whether she would have survived if she had made it to the operating table just a few hours later," the team involved in the children's return said. Ten-year-old Artem and his mother were locked in a basement by Russian soldiers in the middle of the night while his father was beaten in another room – all because he had tried to protect his wife from abuse by a soldier. "Since that incident, the boy often cried and couldn't sleep at night. He was forced to wear a Russian military cap at school, sing the Russian anthem and shout 'Glory to Russia', and the police were called when he said 'Glory to Ukraine'," the Bring Kids Back UA and Save Ukraine teams noted. Fifteen-year-old Khrystyna ended up in complete information isolation and was unable to continue her education. She could not attend online classes at her Ukrainian school because the Russians jammed communication signals, and her mother refused to send her to a Russian school. Background: Earlier, Ukraine had also managed to bring back a 15-year-old boy from Russian occupation who had long dreamed of reuniting with his father. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
USA Today
09-05-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Russia abducts Ukrainian kids and treats them like prisoners of war. Save them.
Russia abducts Ukrainian kids and treats them like prisoners of war. Save them. | Opinion Putin's not just seizing Ukrainian territory and children. He's also waging a spiritual war against Christians and any religion not controlled by the Kremlin. Under international law, infants, toddlers and teenagers who have an inherent right to life must be protected during wars and not moved to an enemy state. But since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Russians have treated Ukrainian children more like prisoners of war and pawns in President Vladimir Putin's effort to forge a new Russian empire. About 20,000 children have been abducted from their families by Russia, the Ukrainian government has verified. That number is likely well into the six figures now, but it's difficult to get information out of occupied Ukraine, and the Russians aren't helping. Moscow has sent some teens to Russian camps where they're brainwashed to forget their nationality and receive military training. Some teens have told us that they're encouraged to take up arms against their home country. One boy, who was 16 when abducted, said he refused to sing the Russian national anthem, which was required each morning, and was thrown into solitary confinement four times. Fortunately, after nearly a year he managed to escape the camp, aided by Save Ukraine, a group that has rescued 630 children. The teen, whose first name is Rostyslav ‒ we can't use his last name for fear of reprisals against his family ‒ tells his compelling story in our documentary "A Faith Under Siege," which will premiere May 10 on the Christian Broadcasting Network News. Putin accused of war crimes in kidnapping Ukrainian children Along with the teens, the younger children suffer from having been torn away from their families, including some who were turned into orphans by Russians who killed their parents. At least those children are still alive. Five boys and two girls have been "summarily executed' in Russian-occupied territory of Ukraine, meaning they were accused of crimes and not even given a trial, according to a United Nations report. Opinion: Putin cannot be trusted to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine in good faith As early as February 2023, a year after Russia's invasion, thousands of children were already shipped to 43 reeducation camps across Russia, including in Siberia and a city near the Pacific Ocean, nearly 4,000 miles from the Ukrainian border. At the camps, the children are forced to attend Russian schools, where they're forbidden from speaking their native language and are taught from new textbooks to love Russia and hate Ukraine and the West. Yet indoctrinating children in schools isn't enough for the Kremlin. They want to make them Russian citizens, and Russia does so by forcing Ukrainian orphans to get Russian passports. Once they do, returning to Ukraine, even to their extended families, would violate Russian law against international 'adoptions.' Russia's actions are a gruesome reminder of Nazi Germany's effort in World War II to turn about 200,000 Polish children into Aryans – a move that was considered a war crime. In 2023, based on the abductions, the International Criminal Court (ICC) accused Putin and Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova of war crimes. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the commissioner claimed that parents with children voluntarily left war-torn parts of Ukraine, and that Russia brought in 2,000 orphans and abandoned children, all for humanitarian reasons. Because Russia is not a party to the ICC, neither Putin nor the commissioner has been arrested. Why are evangelicals so hated by the Russians? Russia's war is not just about seizing children and territory from Ukraine. It's also a spiritual war against any religion that is not controlled by the Kremlin. The Russians have damaged or destroyed at least 630 churches and killed 48 religious leaders as of 2024, a number that constantly grows. Merely saying you're an evangelical or praying in front of a Russian can lead to torture, as our documentary shows. In August 2014, when Russia illegally seized Luhansk, Donbas and Crimea from Ukraine, Viktor Chernaiivsky, who was evacuating people, was captured and thrown into detention. In his cell, he prayed with other prisoners. A priest heard about that and said 'because I am an evangelical Christian, he has to cast out demons from me,' Chernaiivsky recounted. After that, 'they tased me with electricity, and they hit me with baseball bats … and they were simulating shooting at me, as well.' Opinion: Russia is killing and torturing Ukrainian Christians, not 'protecting' them In an occupied Ukrainian city, Russians cut down the cross outside a church and raised their own flag instead, closing the church to worshippers. 'Russia is trying to replace God with the Russian state,' said the documentary narrator. Why are evangelicals so hated by the Russians? 'Our churches never want to be under government, under Communist Party, under KGB,' evangelical leader Pavlo Unguryan said. 'We have just one leader. It's Jesus Christ.' The film's most tragic scenes involve fathers coping with family deaths. One father lost his wife and baby son. Another lost his wife and all three children. 'I don't know how I will live without them,' he said. Yet in the midst of despair, the documentary provides vivid examples of how the Ukrainians and their religions will survive. After Russian rockets destroyed a church, Ukrainians were clearing away the rubble and working to rebuild what they had lost. Still, their most dreadful losses are the thousands of abducted Ukrainian children who are stuck in Russia. If Putin truly wanted peace, he would already be sending children back home. Ukrainians are ready for the war to end, but any peace agreement must return those children to their true families. Steven Moore, a former congressional chief of staff who moved to Ukraine on Day 5 of the war, is founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project and executive producer of the documentary "A Faith Under Siege." Colby Barrett, a Colorado-based entrepreneur, farmer and former Marine, is a producer of the documentary.
Bloomberg
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Ukraine, Europe Insist Russia Truce Must Precede Any Land Deal
By , Alberto Nardelli, and Daryna Krasnolutska Save Ukraine and its European allies have told the US that a ceasefire and clarity on security guarantees for Kyiv should precede any peace deal with Russia that involves negotiations about territory, according to people familiar with the matter. Ahead of a meeting in London Wednesday, the officials sought further detail from Washington on the sequencing of its proposal to stop the fighting in Ukraine and to bring an end to Russia's full-scale invasion, currently into its fourth year. It's the latest attempt to influence the talks that had left Europe under pressure as Washington pushes for a deal with Vladimir Putin and tries to exert tough conditions on Kyiv.
