"One Ukrainian mother thought she was doing her children a favor when she sent them away from the city of Izyum to a camp suggested by the Russian occupier, but in order to get them back, after they were stranded, she had to go through a very long and dangerous journey."

This is how the French newspaper Le Parisien summarized - in a report by Christel Prigodo, its envoy to Izyum - the story of Lyudmila, that woman who remained in hiding for two months with her husband, 3 children and 7 neighbors, when the city of Izyum fell to the Russian army.

The only source of entertainment available to the hiders - as the reporter says - was a battery-powered radio that picked up one Russian station, and only offered pop music and commercials, one of which caught the attention of the 10-year-old boy, Kirill, as he talks about beach camp, games, soccer and friends. and a small school in the morning.

Lyudmila finds - as other Ukrainians found in the city of Izyum - free accommodation provided by the Russian state to "improve the health of children" in the occupied territories, according to the declaration, so she went out and registered Kirill and his brother Yevgen (16 years old) on the list of people going on vacation in Russia, and her eldest son remained because his age greater than required.

The two children traveled at the end of last August, with 50 young men from Izyum, Kobyansk and Borova, to spend 3 weeks in Krasnodar, between the Crimea and the seaside resort of Sochi, where the summer residence of the Kremlin president, says the newspaper's envoy.

The village of Izyum was widely destroyed as a result of the fierce fighting it witnessed between the Russian and Ukrainian forces (Reuters)

charge of collaborating with the enemy

The mother never thought about the dangers of separation from her children during the war, nor did she choose a specific party on the day she sent her children, but what she did today is considered madness at best and a crime at its worst, as how does she send her children to rest with the enemy?

When the Ukrainian army regained Izyum last September, the adults were present in Ukraine while the youth were in Russia, so Lyudmila, who was wounded in her foot and terrified, communicated with other mothers until they became 32 women, and they alerted the Ukrainian authorities to what they had fallen into, especially since the camp was about to end. Finished, the kids are stuck in Russia.

But the Russian authorities - as the correspondent says - require the mothers to come in person to take their children, while Lyudmila is without a passport because she has not left her region before, so the authorities transferred the mothers to Kyiv to obtain the required papers, to cross Ukraine and travel by bus through Poland to Belarus.

Lyudmila had to travel 3,700 kilometers and spend hours trying to circumvent the 1,500-kilometer front line, all in order to reach Krasnodar, which is only 600 kilometers from Izyum, and meet her children there.

Due to the difficulty of the journey, only 3 mothers have yet to return their children.

"In the camp we were in, we continued to go to the beach, everything was quiet. There was no bombing, no sirens," Yevgen says. His mother says they "basically studied mathematics and physics," and she assumes that "the intentions of the occupation authorities were to prove Russia's generosity." Grand".