17-year-old boy deported from Mariupol is called up in Russia

17-year-old Bohdan Yermokhin, who was illegally deported from Mariupol, has been served with a military summons in Russia.

This is reported by Radio Liberty with reference to Kateryna Bobrovska, the teenager's lawyer. 

Bohdan's parents died when he was eight, and his sister has acted as his guardian ever since then. 

Initially Russian servicemen took Bohdan to occupied Donetsk. In May 2022, he ended up in a children's sanatorium in Moscow Oblast.

In July 2022, he was placed under the care of Iryna Rudnitskaya, a Russian citizen and veteran of one of the Chechen wars. After that, he contacted the lawyer and asked her to help him. 

"Since July 2022, Bohdan has made several unsuccessful attempts to return to Ukraine. He is still under guardianship in Russia, despite the fact that he has a legal guardian in Ukraine. He has been given an internal Russian passport and is being forced to obtain a Russian passport in order to travel abroad," Kateryna Bobrovska notes.

Bohdan will turn 18 on 19 November. He has already received a summons to report to the Moscow Oblast enlistment office on 19 December 2023.

"Bohdan's sister and I have provided all the necessary documents confirming that Bohdan and his sister are blood relatives, as well as documents confirming that she is his legal guardian. 

The documents are notarised and apostilled [an apostille is an official government-issued certificate attached to documents so that they are recognised when presented in another country – ed.]. His Ukrainian internal passport and Ukrainian passport are also available," Bobrovska says. 

However, in a conversation with the lawyer, Bohdan told her that Maria Lvova-Belova (the Russian President’s Commissioner for Children's Rights) has no intention of allowing him to return to Ukraine. 

Reminder: Volunteers recently brought back another 19 children from the temporarily occupied territories.

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