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Denys Kostev, kidnap victim: »We were told that the children were going to a children's holiday camp in Crimea. Of course they didn’t say how long we would be there.”

Here in Warsaw, Poland, 18-year-old Denys Kostev is now safe - about a year and a half after he was kidnapped by Russian soldiers from a Ukrainian orphanage in Kherson.

These recordings are from June 4, 2022. They are intended to show four masked Russian soldiers gaining access to the orphanage. The Reuters news agency, which visited Kostev in Warsaw, was also able to verify the location using the walls visible in the video and with the help of a journalist on site and the head of the center. The soldiers interviewed the staff and viewed documents about the children. In the fall of 2022, the occupiers told Denys Kostev and five other young people from the orphanage that they had to leave the city.

Denys Kostev, kidnap victim: »I refused immediately. I said I don't want to go there. At the time I was working and had a girlfriend. I said I wanted to stay here. But they threatened they would take me away by force.”

Many people felt the same way as Denis Kostev. According to Ukrainian information, around 20,000 children and young people have been abducted to Russia since the start of the war, lured with promises or taken away from destroyed cities. According to Ukrainian authorities, only just under 390 of them have returned so far, like these children in April 2023 - and now Denys Kostev.

He had spent several months in reception camps in Russian-controlled Crimea. Officials ordered him to spread pro-Russian propaganda in front of television cameras. Several videos featuring him were also published on the Internet. This didn't happen voluntarily.

Denys Kostev, kidnap victim: »You are alone. There is no one around you who is worried about your life. Nobody needs you. And when your life is threatened, you do everything you can to protect yourself. When you're asked to do something, you say: No problem, it's done."

Last year, he and other kidnapped teenagers were finally taken from Crimea to Henichesk, a city in the Russian-occupied part of the Kherson region. There he recorded the conditions of the accommodation on a video - for which, as he says, Russian police officers then threatened him with a beating.

Denys Kostev, kidnap victim: »We were shocked. I took a video of the conditions under which we were accommodated there. When I got to my room it was zero degrees Celsius. I went in, breathed on a light bulb and saw my breath."

Only a few of the abducted young people and children are lucky and somehow make it back to their families, like these children did last year. Some kidnapping victims are sometimes released again after days, others only after weeks or months - the vast majority not yet. Many returnees report physical and psychological violence.

Denys Kostev, kidnap victim: »And so I had to say under duress that I didn't want to return to Ukraine. To the authorities, exactly. For seven months I disappeared from the eyes of everyone who wanted to get me out of Russia, even from the eyes of my relatives.”

Kostev was finally able to leave Russia in February of this year. He had previously disposed of his old SIM cards to avoid electronic surveillance by the Russian authorities. But he doesn't want to go back to Ukraine either, where he could be viewed as a Russian collaborator. In Warsaw he is now waiting for entry documents to Germany, where family members live.

Denys Kostev, kidnap victim: »I'm a bit tired. I want to stop living a nomadic life. I want to stay in one place and live in peace.«