This week saw the third anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Known to the rest of the world as Putin’s “full-scale military invasion” of the nation.
Although the Ukrainians managed to stop the Russian forces’ conquering their whole country in the early weeks of the war, around a fifth of the country remains occupied by the Russian military. The human costs of that are unimaginable.
I returned to Ukraine this week to see some of the less-reported consequences of Putin’s war.
One outrage that is finally being talked about — raised by President Trump last week — is the Ukrainian children who have been abducted or otherwise held captive by the Russian army since the war began.
It should now be clear that Russia’s abuse of the Ukrainian population — and in particular its children — must be front and center of any ceasefire negotiation.
The abducted children all had the misfortune to be behind what are now Russian lines, in the eastern parts of the country that Russia still occupies.
Some 20,000 children were taken away into Russia. Some were orphans, others were separated from their families.
They will be raised indoctrinated into Putin’s vision, speaking Russian, not Ukrainian. Many will be recruited into his army. It is a war crime.
Those left in the occupied territory are hardly more fortunate.
This week I sat down with a number of children from these areas and heard first-hand from them their accounts of the horrors inflicted on them.
There was a 17-year-old who wanted to remain nameless who recently managed to escape with his mother from behind the Russian lines.
They came out through a long, circuitous route — through Russia, Belarus and back into Ukraine from the north.
They had been living under Russian occupation for almost three years and had seen how the Russian occupiers run things.
Their neighbor was randomly taken to a Russian prison, detained and tortured. He returned home “mentally broken.”
Then a few weeks ago the son was doing his online school work when a woman turned up at the front-door.
She gave him papers and told him he had to sign them. She explained that in one week he was to report for duty — to the Russian army. So he and his mother fled, with three other children.
“Everyone in our neighborhood is waiting to be liberated” the boy’s mother tells me. She hopes to return because all they have is their house and the house of the mother’s brother, who was already killed in the war. “Apart from that we have nothing,” she says. Two houses. Behind enemy lines.
There are thousands of stories like this. Outside of Kyiv this week, at a shelter run by an organization called “Save Ukraine”, I met up with a family of four.
Fifteen-year-old twins Mykhailo and Oleksandra are being looked after by their elder sister Daria, 21, who is nursing a one-year old baby of her own.
They recently escaped from the Kherson region where they lived under Russian occupation for three years with their grandfather.
The only schools open in their region since the invasion are Russian-controlled schools, teaching Russian language and Putin’s values.
And so for three years the twins stayed at home, trying to learn online. “Why?” I asked. “Fear” says the boy. “The Russians are always patrolling” asking for papers and more.
They explain how carefully the Russians have trapped ethnic Ukrainians. Some of their friends went to summer camps that the Russians said were open for Ukrainian children.
They never returned. The Russians simply kept the Ukrainian children and took them away from their families for re-education or worse.
What did they do on the occasions when Russian troops came to their house? “Our grandfather lied and said that were no kids in the house.” Whenever the soldiers came to the door the children hid.
Will they ever go back? “Yes — after the war” they all say.
But it is hard to see an end to the war, or any kind of peace, in regions that Putin’s forces have brutalized for years.
Another boy — Dmytro, 15 — is alone now. He managed to flee the Russian-occupied regions (also through Belarus) last November.
Life under Russian occupation was, he tells me, a matter of “constant fear, panic and paranoia.”
He describes how, at the beginning of September, Russian special forces wearing civilian clothes and flak jackets knocked at the door of his family’s home.
They entered the house and took all the family’s phones and documents. Then they took Dmytro’s mother out into the yard and questioned her. They came back in and said they needed to take her away for a “proper” interrogation.
Dmytro’s father demanded of them “Why take her, not me?” The soldiers replied: “We know what we’re doing.”
Later that day Dmytro’s older sister got a video call from her mother’s phone. A Russian soldier on the other end said that their mother had two choices: she could “cooperate” or “mum is going to prison.”
They then showed the girl her mother in a cell, on a chair, handcuffed to a water-pipe.
After two weeks, the authorities showed the woman’s husband a paper “signed” by her saying “I reject my family and am starting a new life.”
But Russian forces lie. Recently the Russian Secret Service (FSB) released a video of one of Dmytro’s neighbors.
They said she was trying to arrange explosions. In fact they had abducted the woman nine months earlier.
Dmytro knows only two other things about the situation of his mother. Like many other people arrested she is accused of “Possible cooperation with Ukrainian forces.”
Her son also knows that after her abduction she was taken to a torture chamber to see someone being tortured with electrodes. The Russians assumed that this would be enough to make her collaborate with them.
So Dmytro fled. When he too finally made his way around to the northern Ukrainian border he found a Ukrainian soldier. “Am I safe?” was the boy´s first question.
Strange to say, these children are the fortunate ones. They are the ones who have been able to flee. Tens of thousands more are left behind.
Those who haven’t been stolen into Russia are hiding, getting forced into “Russification” programs or being forced into the Russian army to fight against their own people.
To say that these are all war crimes is to state the obvious. To say that these are crimes against humanity is to use a phrase totally unfit for the task.
What they are is a tiny sample from the vast population of children to whom Vladimir Putin brought terror and war since 2022. In a war of his choosing. A war he could have ended on a day of his choosing. If he had wanted to.