Ukrainian orphan teenager's story from Mariupol heard at US Congress

Viktoriia Andrieieva, staff writer at Ukrainska Pravda.Zhyttia, 20 April 2023

16-year-old Bohdan Yermokhin from Mariupol was deported to Russia by the occupiers in 2022. 

His lawyer, Kateryna Bobrovska, spoke at the US Congress in Washington on 19 April. She told the story of the teenager whom the terrorist country is refusing to release, journalist and activist Maria Lebedeva has reported.

"I was contacted by a teenager named Bohdan. He was born in Mariupol. He was in Russia with Roman (another deported boy) and had been given a new family. The adoptive family also took away his papers. Then he reached out to me for help," Kateryna Bobrovska began.

Speech of the lawyer in the USA. Screenshot from the video recording

She noted that Bohdan is under psychological pressure. He was eager to go back to Ukraine and travelled more than 1,000 km to the border.

The Mariupol teenager’s Russian adoptive parents had taken his Ukrainian documents away from him, so the Ukrainian side produced special papers for him that enabled him to leave the territory of the aggressor country. However, the Russian secret services would not let him go. 

Special forces took Bohdan to an investigative committee for interrogation and then detained him.

After that, Bohdan was also used in the filming of propaganda stories on Russian television. 

"When I saw one of the stories he was featured in after he was detained, I noticed important changes in him," the lawyer continues. "He had dark circles under his eyes, and his haircut was changed. They cut his hair short as if he was going to serve in the military. The words he was saying on Russian TV did not correspond to what was actually happening. Presumably he was either being threatened or had been told to say what the government wanted."

Kateryna Bobrovska also had a case involving another teenager, Roman, who did manage to return to Ukraine.

"Roman’s and Bohdan’s stories have a lot in common, and this tells us that such crimes are systematic and widespread, and they are happening in temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. These facts tell us that this is a detailed, premeditated operation aimed at deporting Ukrainian children to Russia," Kateryna emphasised during the Congress hearing.

Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children's Affairs, stated that the teenager was not allowed to leave the country. He was stopped at the border with Belarus.

It is worth noting that Bohdan Yermokhin was an orphan at the time of the full-scale invasion. His legal representative was the director of the Mariupol college where the young man was studying. Nevertheless, the occupiers illegally moved the teenager first to Donetsk and then to Moscow Oblast, where he was adopted by a Russian family.

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