The fate of Vladimir Bespalov and Maria Bespalaya in Mariupol, Ukraine, during the February 24th February 1944 invasion: From a young family to a virtual wasteland
When Russian forces invaded their country in late February, Vladimir Bespalov and Maria Bespalaya feared their long-held dream of starting a family through adoption was over.
Vladimir Bespalov vividly remembers the morning of February 24th, when the war began. “We thought we were too late. We realized we were already in a state of war, and we thought we could no longer adopt.”
He said the couple was pushed to do it sooner because of the situation. We had been waiting to earn more money, have a better car, buy a house, and build something for our children first. But when the war started, we thought why not adopt a child now and accomplish these things together as a family.”
It was soon after that message that a volunteer came to help those fleeing the southern city of Mariupol, which became a point of pride for the Russian President and his campaign to take Ukrainian land.
Russian troops bombarded the city with weapons that were fired into the air. It is now a virtual wasteland, with nearly every building damaged or destroyed, and an unknown number of dead beneath the rubble.
The police were able to learn that his mother had left home to find food for her family when she was struck down by Russian bombardment.
“The men were drinking alcohol and the children of those neighbors bullied him. Bespalaya told CNN he was starving and freezing. She is careful to not say anything about it in front of him but he has told her a lot about his terrifying three-week stay in the basement.
Once back in Kyiv, they underwent a complex, four-month process to become Ilya’s legal guardians which involved speaking to therapists, many doctor visits, police background checks, and a government search to ensure the boy had no other living relatives. Various donors, including the Shakhtar Donetsk Football Club, helped provide financial support that allowed the family to find a comfortable home.
The young couple are very protective of their son and try to give him a sense of stability and security by protecting him from the horrors of war.
“You try to take your mind off the fighting and immerse yourself in spending time with your child. We tried to create memories of a normal childhood. Bespalov, who has not been called up for military service despite his important role as a railroad worker, said work takes time but they spend every free moment together.
But there is nothing normal about war. After they posted their appeal on Instagram, the couple set up two spare rooms for the possible arrival of a child – one a nursery with a white crib and blue bedding, the other equipped with a bunk bed and lots of toys.
“I just totally stopped being afraid of adoption. I was confident that we would have a child, and I was confident that I could care for anyone and deal with their character,” she told CNN.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/europe/ukraine-orphaned-boy-new-family-intl-cmd/index.html
Do you have a baby? (Laughter, laugh and tears) When they learn to do something, they find refuge in a place where everyone is safe
But that plan, too, was shattered by war. Soon after it began, the pair were forced to flee their home in Slovyansk, a city in the frontline Donetsk region, for Kyiv.
In April, they finally received the call they had been hoping for, from a volunteer in Mariupol: there was a little boy with no parents, could the couple care for him?
The following morning, they started out on the two-day car journey to Dnipro, where Ilya was sheltering, to meet the boy who would become part of their family.
“Now we have that love, that love that makes you a family. We did not have a baby, but our love is the same as before, according to Bespalaya.
But little Ilya is learning to cope. He looked up and said he wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore as he played with a couple in a living room lit by candles. I know the light will turn back on.”
According to the report, over 6,000 children ranging from just months old to 17 years of age have been in the custody of Russia during the course of the war.
“This is not one rogue camp, this is not one rogue mayor or governor,” says Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab. It is a huge logistical undertaking that is done by many people.
She says the Russian government should make all of this seem normal because it’s difficult to move these many kids around without being noticed.
“In some cases there is adoption, other cases summer camp programs where the kids were slated to return home and never did,” he says, “and in some cases they are re-education camps.”
Analysis of the First Russian Social Media Posts, Government Announcements and Observations from the Humanitarian Research Lab in the South of the Russian Republic
Raymond says that the most extensive look at the program so far is the report from Yale. He emphasizes that it shows scale, chain of command and logistical complexity.
The first days of the war saw 400 children sent to a facility in the southern Russian state of Rostov-on-Don.
Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian government and U.N. have raised the alarm over these activities.
The first Russian social media posts appeared last year, which led the researchers to investigate missing Ukrainian children. The Yale researchers say the messaging began at the time of Putin’s announcement. He asked not to be named to protect the security of his work from hackers.
“I believe the first places we saw this were on Telegram and then VK,” he says. Telegram is a popular Russian messaging service. It’s the Russian version of Facebook.
The Humanitarian Research lab at Yale uses open source and satellite imagery to provide analysis of war crimes in real time.
There are about 20 researchers who scour social media posts, news reports, government announcements and Russian messaging services, looking for patterns and connections that otherwise might go unnoticed.
The Yale Lab: exposing children to Russian-centric academic, cultural and patriotic facilities, and military education as a political re-education operation
“The primary purpose of the camps appears to be political reeducation,” he said, noting that at least 32 of the facilities identified in the report “appear to be engaged in systematic re-education efforts that expose children from Ukraine to Russia-centric academic, cultural, patriotic, and in two cases, specifically military education.”
This operation is coordinated by the Russia’s federal government and involves every level of government according to the report. The Yale program identified several dozen federal, regional and local figures “directly engaged and politically justifying the program.”
The team at Yale is made up of young Internet sleuths who gather data and document the steps needed to meet standards and protocols for trial.
Raymond describes the lab as a “Cyber cop shop” that is careful to detail a chain of custody for the evidence produced. To understand the Lab’s role, he points to the TV show Law and Order.
He says that his job is to collect evidence, digital evidence and then see if it does not conflict with the law.
“We are showing that we can collect perishable evidence and make it actionable in ways that were previously impossible. In the past this scale of operation was only available to governments,” he says.
Raymond says civil society uses the same tools as governments and that it is the future of war crimes investigations at the Yale Lab.
“Mounting evidence of Russia’s actions lays bare the Kremlin’s aims to deny and suppress Ukraine’s identity, history, and culture,” it continued. The impact of Putin’s war on Ukraine’s children will be felt for generations. The United States will stand withUkraine and pursue accountability for Russia’s abuses as long as necessary.
It put together a network that stretches from one end of Russia to the other, and included facilities such as Russia’s occupied Crimea and the Eastern Pacific Coast.
Several children from eastern Ukraine were among the group of almost 200 children who attended a military patriotic camp in Chechnya over the summer. The program was organized by Lvova-Belova and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, according to official statements issued by their offices.
The report found that “many children taken to camps are sent with the consent of their parents for an agreed duration of days or weeks and returned to their parents as originally scheduled,” but noted that “in many cases, the ability of parents to provide meaningful consent may be considered doubtful, as the conditions of war and implicit threat from occupying forces represent conditions of duress.”
“It’s also critically important to understand that these are children who – the lack of contact that they have, or the only intermittent contact that they may have with their parents, is causing very real and potential harm on a very daily basis,” said Caitlin Howarth, also of Yale Humanitarian Research Lab.
Several dozen federal, regional and local figures are directly engaged in operating and politically justifying the program, according to the report, and at least 12 of them are not on U.S. or international sanctions lists.
The deportation of a civilian population and the forcible transfers of children from one group to another are considered to be genocide under international agreements.
Russian officials often talk about Ukrainian children receiving Russian citizenship and taking part in nationalistic activities, camps and excursions, as well as being sent to “patriotic” schools.
On the wonderful life of children in the Donetsk-Vorpomesk region of Ukraine, as declared by the United Nations High Commission on Children and Families
The US State Department said in a media note that “the unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and constitutes a war crime.”
Lvova-Belova will be able to use additional measures to locate children who don’t have parental care in the Ukrainian regions it claims to have annexed.
Adoption should never happen during or immediately after emergencies, and children should not be assumed to be orphans, according to the UN’s children’s organization. The UN furthermore considers forcibly transferring another country’s population within or beyond its borders to be a war crime.
“I will be frank, I was crossing the threshold with trepidation: how have they settled in, have they got everything they need, how have the relations with parents and other children in the family worked out,” she wrote. “But all doubts were gone in the first minute.” The family is wonderful!”
“For me, this is yet another confirmation that the work that we have done on the placement of orphans from Donbass is not in vain. Everything was done correctly.
A Kremlin readout of her meeting with Vladimir Putin in February revealed she told the Russian President: “Now I know what it means to be a mother of a child from Donbas – it is a difficult job but we love each other, that is for sure.”
Born in the western city of Penza, Lvova-Belova began her career as a children’s guitar teacher. She eventually became involved in local politics, working her way up through the Russian power structure.
In a tearful television news report posted to her Telegram channel in November, Lvova-Belova recalled adopting a teenage boy from Mariupol, who said that he had been put on the streets by the guardians who took him in after his mother died of cancer.
Alongside idyllic photos of campfires by the Black Sea, she said last August that Ukrainian children from the Donetsk region are in for an “extraordinary camp season.”
Teenagers can use the nine themed workshops at the camp to work out their life plans. We look forward to the opening of the camp!”
Russian Embassy in Kiev: The Case of Arina Yatsiuk and Valeria Lvova Belvova-Belova
The US is accused of being involved in the deaths of children in eastern Ukraine by the embassy.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met Thursday with Maria Lvova-Belova, the official at the center of an alleged Russian government scheme to relocate, reeducate, and sometimes militarily train or forcibly adopt out Ukrainian children.
Putin said in the video that the amount of work is growing and he has known that for a long time. The number of applications from our citizens regarding the adoption of children from the Donetsk and Luhansk republics is increasing. The issue has been dealt with by theCommissioner’s Institute for almost nine years.
A week after Russia invaded, the family of 15-year-old Arina Yatsiuk decided to flee their home near the Ukrainian capital by car. They encountered some Russian troops less than 10 miles down the road.
The soldiers started shooting, then dragged Arina and her 9-year-old sister Valeria out of the back seat. Arina was wounded and put into one car; Valeria was ushered into another.
Valeria was taken to a nearby village, where locals found her standing by the road. Denys and Anna were found dead in their car.
The last time anybody saw Arina was March 3, 2022. There have been over a hundred children who have been missing since Russia launched its war on Ukraine last February.
“I sent official letters to all of the medical facilities, to the Ministry of Health in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine and the official answer I received is that she has not been registered anywhere,” Yatsiuk told CNN in a phone interview.
The volunteer who was involved in the search for the girl told CNN that there have been no new leads since the fall.
Investigating the disappearance of a family of missing children in the Mykolaiv region of Russia During the February 2022 Russian-Russia war
She is a witness. If her younger sister didn’t understand that her parents were killed, I suppose that she understood, she herself was wounded and is also a victim of a war crime,” Lypovetska told CNN in an interview at Magnolia’s office in Kyiv.
Magnolia has received more than 2,600 requests from families and friends of missing children since the start of the full-scale war in February 2022, more than the total number of calls it got over the previous 20 years.
Its 18 employees work round the clock. They are in touch with the families of missing children, offering psychological and legal help. The group is using various methods to gather information including open-source intelligence, public appeals and social media sleuthing.
In the early days of the war, the vast majority of calls were from desperate families who had lost contact with their loved ones in occupied areas, but now most are connected to military actions.
A small group of children described by officials as having been rescued from the Donbas was paraded in front of tens of thousands of people during a rally in Moscow last month. One of the girls referred to Uncle Yuri as the man who saved them from Mariupol, and they were encouraged to hug him.
CNN asked the office of Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights if they had any reaction to the allegations. It received a generic acknowledgement, but didn’t reply.
“They took all the personal files, they took all the hard drives, broke all the monitors, all the CCTV cameras, and took all the Ukrainian history books and a few others that they did not like,” he said.
While he managed to protect the 52 children he had under his guardianship, all between the ages of three and 18 years, he said a separate group of children that had been evacuated to the school from the Mykolaiv region was taken away by Russian troops.
Sahaidak told CNN he managed to reach the head of the Mykolaiv school, who told him the group had been taken – against her will – to the Black Sea town of Anapa in Russia. According to Sahaidak, volunteers later helped the group to escape to Georgia. He said that the children were still there in February.
Many of the children living in the Moscow region, with their families, are from the eastern part of Ukraine.
There was a father from Kharkiv who went by the name of Magnolia NGOs. The man’s wife had been killed while attempting to flee the fighting and the whereabouts of their 10-year-old son were unknown – until the father saw a video of his boy on a Russian TV program.
The father and his son hadn’t been together in more than two months. Ukrainian and Russian volunteers, along with lawyers, were involved in trying to locate the boy and negotiate his return.
The boy was eventually found in Russian-occupied Luhansk. It was up to the boy’s mother and grandmother to make the journey since his father couldn’t leave the area and he might be forced to fight for the independence of the region.
“It’s impossible to go to Luhansk from Ukraine, so they had to make a big circle through Russia, cross the border, then back through Russia to Europe, and only then back to Ukraine,” Lypovetska said.
Russian citizenship can now be granted to Ukrainians as long as they are orphans, children without parental care or people with dementia, according to a new Russian law.
Photographs from the camp published by Chechen state media show teenage boys dressed in white hoodies printed with pictures of Kadyrov and Putin, waving Russian and separatist flags.
More than a thousand teenagers from four regions illegally annexed by Putin attended special rehabilitation programs which included visiting famous Russian sights and meeting celebrities.
CNN obtained a message from one of the camps to Serhiy’s mom in Ukranian. In it, he said: “My friends and I were forced to sing the Russian anthem, but we didn’t sing it. We got no reaction because they didn’t see us. We have to sing the Russian anthem during every day’s morning exercises.” CNN isn’t revealing his name for security reasons.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/06/europe/ukraine-missing-children-russia-intl-cmd/index.html
Yukawa’s niece Oksana Yatsiuk: She is not afraid of the loss of her father and her sister Valeria
Her aunt and uncle have formally adopted her younger sister Valeria. According to Oksana Yatsiuk, the little girl is receiving psychological support and is coming to terms with the loss of her parents.
“We all believe she is alive and we will soon find her. We are considering all options, including that she might have already been adopted,” she added.
Isn’t this patriotism when there isn’t any other person’s children, or kids, that are ours, now? According to a statement, she said it.