"They said he was going to a summer camp": How one mother managed to get back her son after he was abducted from Kherson
Alla is the mother of 13-year-old Danylo, a student at Kherson School No. 27.
In October 2022, when Kherson was still occupied, the school’s headteacher suggested that the students go to a camp in Crimea, saying that it was dangerous to stay in the city because the Russians were staging provocations against the civilian population.
For the sake of her son’s safety, Alla agreed. She would not see Danylo for another six months, says Mykola Kuleba, a former children's ombudsman and director of the charity Save Ukraine.
The headteacher, who was collaborating with the Russian occupiers, said the children would be staying at the summer camp for two weeks, but when the time was up, no one brought them back.
Alla with her son Danylo
Photo: Mykola Kuleba
Danylo was initially at a camp called Druzhba ("Friendship") in Crimea.
"Every morning began with the Russian national anthem, and every week the children had to listen to ‘conversations about important things’, featuring a fictional history of Russia in which Kherson was always Russian, and the Russians were its liberators," Kuleba said.
He added that the children were intimidated and bullied at the camp and were forbidden to speak Ukrainian. If these rules were broken, "educational talks" were held with the children.
Three months later, Danylo was moved to another camp in Crimea called Luchistyi.
"The food was terrible, they scrimped on the heating, and they forced the Ukrainian children to clean up litter on the beach. The children were threatened with being handed over to Russian foster families," the former children's ombudsman notes.
Alla had been trying to contact the camp management to find out about her son for six months when she turned to Save Ukraine for help.
Later, when Alla went to the camp to pick up her son, she was interrogated several times.
"She was interrogated by FSB officers for 14 hours at the airport in Moscow, and then, in Yevpatoria, she was forced to give an interview to the propaganda TV channel Russia 1 [saying she was] 'grateful for the rest'," Kuleba said.
He added that women who had come to collect their children were only let into the camp one by one. They were under intense psychological pressure, since "saying the wrong thing on camera would mean losing their child forever".
Alla and her son made it back and are now in Ukraine.
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