War in Ukraine: 31 children illegally taken to Russia return

Europe 1 with AFP 18:51 p.m., April 08, 2023

THE ESSENTIALS

Thirty-one children have returned to Ukraine after being illegally taken to Russia from territories occupied by Moscow, the NGO Save Ukraine announced Saturday on social networks. "Today, we welcome home 31 more children who had been illegally taken by Russians from the occupied territories," wrote Mykola Kuleba, an official of the NGO.

Information to remember:

• 31 children have returned to Ukraine after being illegally taken to Russia from territories occupied by Moscow.
• Kramatorsk residents laid flowers on a memorial at the Donbass city's central train station on Saturday.
• Several hundred people, including the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, gathered in Moscow on Saturday for the funeral of a well-known Russian military blogger.

More than 16,000 Ukrainian children "abducted" according to Kiev

These children had been taken to Russia from the regions of Kharkiv (north-east of Ukraine) and Kherson (south), detailed the association whose main mission is to fight what it describes as "deportations" of Ukrainian children. According to the NGO, the children carrying suitcases and bags crossed the border on foot on Friday, with relatives, and then boarded a bus to continue their journey. Mykola Kuleba praised the "heroic mothers" who came to pick up their children and said it was the "most difficult" mission the NGO has had to carry out so far. An elderly woman who was supposed to bring back two grandchildren died on this occasion of "stress", he lamented, adding on Facebook that the Ukrainian women had been subjected by the Russian security services (FSB) to a "13-hour interrogation".

>> READ ALSO - Emmanuel Macron in China: why the results of the visit of the head of state are mixed

Authorities in Kiev estimate that more than 16,000 Ukrainian children have been "abducted" and taken to Russia since the invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, and many have reportedly been placed in foster homes. Moscow denies the allegations, saying it has "saved" Ukrainian children away from the fighting and has procedures in place to reunite them with their families. On 17th March last the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a historic arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, "allegedly responsible for the war crime of illegal deportation" of Ukrainian minors "from the occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation". The Hague-based court also issued an international arrest warrant for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's children's commissioner, on similar grounds.

Ukrainians commemorate the bombing of Kramatorsk railway station

Kramatorsk residents on Saturday laid flowers at a memorial at the central train station in the Donbass city where a Russian missile strike killed 61 people a year ago as thousands of civilians flocked there to flee the war in Ukraine. On April 8, 2022, the shelling also injured more than 160 people among the crowd that gathered at the station to be evacuated, one of the deadliest attacks targeting civilians fleeing the advancing Russian forces. "My close friend, her daughter and their dog are dead. What more can we say," Tetiana Syshchenko, 67, told AFP in tears. She herself was almost killed in the bombing. Residents approach a small commemorative plaque covered with flowers and children's toys. They make the sign of the cross, stand, kneel or cry.

Some 4,000 civilians had massed a year ago in this railway junction to be evacuated by train when the station was hit by a Tochka-U missile, which experts said was carrying cluster munitions. Arriving at the scene shortly after the attack, AFP journalists saw at least 30 bodies in body bags. The bloodied floor was littered with scattered luggage, children's belongings and food. Moscow denied any involvement in the attack, saying Russian forces were not targeting civilians and that it was a "provocation".

>> READ ALSO - Macron in China: Xi Jinping calls on all parties not to aggravate the situation in Ukraine

Colleagues of Sergiy Kupochka, a 57-year-old municipal employee, were distributing food and water to people waiting to be evacuated when the bombing took place. "One of our employees died here," he told AFP, expressing his grief. Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said on social media that "Russian terrorists" were responsible for the attack and that "war criminals must be punished."

Hundreds attend military blogger's funeral

Several hundred people, including the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, gathered Saturday in Moscow for the funeral of a prominent Russian military blogger supporting the attack in Ukraine and killed last week in a bomb attack. According to AFP journalists on the spot, hundreds of people went to the Troyekurovskoye cemetery in the west of the capital to pay their respects in front of the coffin of Maxim Fomin before his burial. A large police force has been deployed, with careful control of people going to the cemetery. Many of them wore clothes with a Z or V stamped, signs of their support for the offensive in Ukraine.

This assassination is "an attempt to kill the truth (...) who is trying to break through the layer of rot that covers Russian society," Anna Ivannikova, a 33-year-old Moscow manager who came with flowers, told AFP. According to her, Russian society is "still sleeping", except in the cities of Russia closest to Ukraine, where fighting has been raging for more than a year.

On 2nd April Maxim Fomin, known under the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarskiy, was killed in an attack during an event in a café in St Petersburg (north) linked to the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Russian authorities arrested and charged a 26-year-old woman, Daria Trepova, with "terrorism", who admitted to offering the blogger a booby-trapped statuette, which exploded during this event, killing him and injuring about thirty others. However, Daria Trepova has not yet claimed to have participated voluntarily in the attack, nor mentioned possible sponsors.