(At the Ukrainian-Belarusian border) Long hugs: Ukrainian children were greeted Tuesday evening by their relatives as they left Belarus, in the latest transfer of children taken to Russia and the territories occupied during the war .
This is the fourth group of children brought back with the mediation of Qatar, the largest so far, eleven in total, Ukrainian mediator Dmytro Lubinets told AFP at the border.
Their relatives waited more than six hours at a crossing point used for humanitarian purposes before the children, the youngest aged two, emerged from the darkness to be hugged for a long time.
“I’m happy and that’s it,” says Oleksandr, 16, the oldest.
Smiling shyly, he sums up his feelings as “joy and a little nervous, but otherwise everything is fine.” “My first thought is that my new life is actually beginning.”
His aunt Viktoria, 47, says that originally from Sievierodonetsk (eastern Ukraine), he had lived in a hostel since the death of his mother and older brother in the Luhansk region in July 2022, when their car crashed. was bombed as they tried to evacuate.
Oleksandr, who told her he sometimes dreams of his dying mother, will need psychological support, she says.
“We will party”
Since the start of the war, she has only been able to speak with him on the phone once, and has gone to the border areas three times to try, in vain, to look for him.
“Our situation seemed stuck, but eventually everything was resolved,” she rejoices.
He was sent to a public boarding school in Luhansk, an occupied city in eastern Ukraine, where his papers were taken from him “by deception”, she relates: “they put psychological pressure on him to prevent him from leaving.
This mother will take him home to Zhytomyr, near Kyiv. “We’ll party and show him around town.”
But the teenager also has to catch up on school and recover from injuries sustained in the bombed car.
Sergiy, a 36-year-old IT developer from Kyiv, came to pick up his nephew and niece, Lev, 13, and Zhazmin, 10.
When their parents died, they were taken care of near Moscow by a distant relative, who “had no desire to take care of them”, wanted to place them in a home and sent them back to Mariupol, occupied by the Russians.
“I thought it was almost impossible to get them back,” says Sergiy. Without children, he is ready to become a father to them, he smiles.
A woman, a member of the Ukrainian armed forces and who does not wish to speak, came to pick up her 13-year-old son, after being detained by Russia as a prisoner of war for several months in 2022.
Qatar “open” to other returns
The group was welcomed on Monday at the Qatari embassy in Moscow. Among them, two seriously ill children taken by ambulance and hospitalized.
“The main thing, believe me, is that we will bring them all back,” assures Dmytro Lubinets.
“It is Qatar that helps us the most”, he underlines to AFP, “with the appearance of an intermediary we simply have new approaches, and you can see the result”.
Before this mediation, “we saw the reluctance of the Russian side to carry out these processes. Today it has become much easier.”
He returned from Qatar, where he met the prime minister and “raised the issue of the return not only of Ukrainian children, but also of civilians.”
Qatar, which since July 2023 has helped the repatriation of 30 Ukrainian children, is ready to contribute to other returns, its ambassador, Hadi Nasser Mansour Al-Hajri, told AFP.
“We are open to all possibilities: bringing in prisoners of war or political prisoners… and children, we are open to all these things” he said, noting that his country is “almost the only one” to be “involved in this question.
Kyiv accuses Russia of having “deported” thousands of children to its territory from the regions it occupies in Ukraine, Moscow for its part ensuring that it had transferred them to ensure their safety in the face of fighting and was ready to return them to their relatives in Ukraine if they request it.
The International Criminal Court last year issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for “war crimes” over the policy, a decision the Kremlin deems invalid and void.
reference: www.lapresse.ca