'I was 11 when I was taken from my family and sent to Russia before Ukraine war'

13 August 2023 , 15:08

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Sashko Radchuk's (pictured) is one of the many shocking stories of children abducted in Russia's genocidal campaign of abduction (Image: Office of the President of Ukraine)

An 11-year-old boy has told his harrowing story of becoming a victim of Vladimir Putin's systematic abduction of children from their loving families in one of the conflict's most heinous war crimes.

Just under 20,000 children have been deported from their homes and sent to Russia in the 16 months since the start of the invasion, Kyiv claims. UNICEF has described it as "the fastest large-scale displacements of children since World War Two".

Thankfully, some of the children have already made it back to the arms of their families. Sashko Radchuk, who is now almost 13, is among the lucky ones. His story started when he was just 11 years old after he sustained a serious shrapnel injury to his left eye close to his home in the industrial city of Mariupol. Doctors at a pop-up hospital in the bowels of a disused steelworks managed to remove the fragment, but as the fighting drew closer, the pair were trapped inside. After a few weeks, Russia took control of the facility.

Children and women are evacuated on trains to Ukraine's western cities in March last year (Getty Images)

Sashko explained how he and his mother were piled into a truck with Russia's "Z" insignia on the side and moved before being told they were "going to filtration". The term is feared in Ukraine because the process sees Putin's boys playing judge to remove anyone they think could be hostile to his cruel regime, reports the Daily Mail. In several instances, this has resulted in deportation, long jail terms, and even quasi-judicial executions.

Women, men and kids are taken to "filtration points" where many have disappeared (Getty Images)

The process is grim and involves men being stripped and inspected for patriotic tattoos, their phones being pored over for any incriminating detail, and gruelling interrogations on their attitudes to Russia and its tyrannical ruler. Those with links to Ukrainian soldiers are at particular risk. Sashko's dad was a serviceman and while his mum was being interrogated, two child services officers snatched him away.

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A woman cries after being refused passage on a train from Irpin to Kyiv in March last year (Getty Images)

"Your mum will come back soon," one of them told him. "They didn't even let me say goodbye," Sashko added. "I was terrified. Nothing felt real." After being taken from his mother, the abductors took him to another hospital close to Donetsk. Despite his daily pleas to the doctors to contact his mum or his grandma, he had no way of reaching them without a phone or his gran's number.

Liudmyla Siryk, his grandmother, lived around 400 miles north of the Russia-occupied bastion. A colleague showed Liudmyla a Facebook post with her grandson's picture, so she immediately rang the hospital and finally spoke to him for the first time in months.

Ukrainian civilian members of Kyiv's Territorial Defence unit march through a forest in Kyiv in January last year (Getty Images)

As soon as she answered, Sashko begged: "Granny, please, get me out of here. They want to put me in an orphanage!"=

Liudmyla sprang into action, collecting all the documents she needed to retrieve the boy, but she was racing against the clock due to the lengthy processes involved. Liudmyla - who had barely left her hometown before - travelled thousands of miles across Ukraine, then into Poland, Lithuania Latvia and Russia to enter into the occupied territories in an epic journey to prove her relation to the abducted boy.

Ryan Fahey