Russian Mothers Seek Answers – We Demand Return of Abducted Ukrainian Children

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes an article in the print edition titled “Russian Conscript’s Mother Seeks Answers.” The online version of the article is set out below and, among other things, describes the type of coscripts Ukrainian forces found when they invaded the Kursk region.

Their stories are interesting, and one can feel for parents seeking news of their children. BUT the world needs to know about and express its outrage about the thousands-upon-thousands of Ukrainian children who have been abducted and taken into Russia by Putin’s forces since he first invaded Ukraine in 2014.

The abducted Ukrainian children were not conscripts or any type of military or militia personnel; they were children – some infants – purposefully seized and taken to be given new names, new identities, re-programmed to be “Russian”, and adopted by Russian families as Russia.

These children, their parents, and their country should be headline news day-in-and-day-out.

What Putin has implemented as his barbaric policy is, under the Genocide Convention, genocide.

Demand for the return of these children should be an international priority. Anyone suggesting negotiations or any kind of resolution to Putin’s unilateral war must make the return of the abducted Ukrainian children a requirement.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A Russian Mother’s Pleas to Find a Captured Conscript Are Met With Silence

Hundreds of green young recruits were captured during Ukraine’s surprise incursion. Putin had told their families they would be safe.

By Matthew Luxmoore | Aug. 18, 2024 9:00 am ET

Russian conscript Vitaly Izmailov was sent to Russia’s border with Ukraine expecting a calm end to his year of mandatory service. With the main battles happening to the south and east, patrolling the frontier was seen as an uneventful assignment, dull even—the kind of thing a conscript could safely do.

But when Ukraine launched a cross-border attack on Aug. 6, the 19-year-old disappeared.

Izmailov’s mother has lodged desperate pleas for information, even appealing directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin in an online petition signed by the mothers of other soldiers who are missing.

“I’m not going to give up until I find him,” Yevgenia Izmailova said in an interview from the Russian city of Perm.

She presumes that her son is likely one of around 2,000 prisoners Ukraine says it has captured since it launched its offensive—the first foreign invasion of Russian territory since World War II—many of whom it is now holding in temporary detention facilities near the border.

Sweeping through towns and settlements in Russia’s Kursk region, the advance dealt a serious blow to Putin’s image as a guarantor of stability and security and brought home the war’s consequences to Russian families who thought their sons would be safe.

The capture of dozens of undertrained and ill-equipped Russian conscripts, most of whom surrendered to advancing Ukrainian forces after hiding in the forest or hunkering down in the basements of besieged towns, now presents a particular challenge to Putin’s credibility.

Footage released by Ukraine’s military shows at least three Russian soldiers signaling their surrender at the Sudzha border crossing on Aug. 6 before a larger group exits.

These are the soldiers who Putin said would be protected from what the Kremlin calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine. “Only professional soldiers will fulfill the tasks we set,” he said weeks after he launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia has since relied on a motley force of professional troops, paramilitaries, mobilized soldiers and freed convicts to fight its war.

But each year it also enlists some 150,000 conscripts, young men mostly fresh out of high school who are called up for 12 months of mandatory service. Their stint in the military normally consists of manning command posts far in the rear, or doing basic jobs from keeping a military base’s inventory of equipment to painting its perimeter fence.

In Moscow’s past wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan, the use of conscripts prompted mass protests and a powerful mothers’ movement that rattled the Kremlin. But a small number of conscripts continued to be sent into Ukraine despite Putin’s pledge, as Russia scrambled to fill its manpower deficit and bolster a front line stretching across 600 miles.

Others were dispatched to the border with Ukraine in Russia’s west to dig trenches and shore up the defenses Russia was setting up in regions closest to the war zone.

Izmailov was called up for conscription in October 2023, and he had been given almost no military training by the time he was sent to the Kursk region last month, his mother said. Like many Russian conscripts, he had been engaged mostly in menial jobs in the rear. “He said he felt more like a handyman than a soldier,” she said.

Inside Ukraine, Russia was expending huge manpower reserves in its push to seize more land in that country’s east, and getting conscripts to guard the border area was a way to alleviate pressure on the force engaged on the battlefield, as well as to protect against the kinds of short-lived armed raids that Ukrainian-backed troops had previously staged into Russia.

The last time Izmailova spoke with her son was Aug. 4. He told her he was being sent to guard a forested area near a border village. Two days later, Ukrainian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles streamed across the frontier in an attack far larger than any before. Border-guard units that included conscripts were overwhelmed.

Footage soon emerged of dozens of Russian soldiers surrendering to Ukrainian forces, and Ukrainian media began publishing videos of the conscripts, many of them teenagers, being questioned on camera. The conscripts complained of being thrown into the fight without adequate arms or training and being left to fend for themselves when their superiors fled their border posts.

“We told our commanders, conscripts should not be at the border, get us out of here. They told us we must stay,” one 20-year-old conscript said. “They threw us to the dogs.”

At her home in Perm, a city some 700 miles east of Moscow, Izmailova began making inquiries about her son. She called the military base where he was enlisted and was told that Izmailov was on a training trip in another region and would be unreachable until the following week.

Not trusting the military command, she reached out to one of Izmailov’s fellow servicemen. In an Aug. 9 text exchange that she shared with The Wall Street Journal, the young man said he saw Izmailov being taken captive. He said troops of Russia’s Akhmat Battalion, which was also in the border area, fled their positions and left the conscripts alone.

“Everything fell apart,” the fellow conscript wrote to Izmailov’s mother. “If I survive, I’ll tell you the story.” Her further messages to the serviceman went unanswered. Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War didn’t immediately answer requests to confirm Izmailov’s capture.

By this time, Russia’s VK social network was full of posts from mothers searching for information about conscript sons who had gone missing since Aug. 6. A VK page dedicated to the search for missing soldiers, which has 59,000 subscribers, was receiving several posts a day.

Obituaries of dead conscripts were also being published on local news sites across Russia, on the social-media profiles of the karate and boxing clubs they fought in and in local church pages. The young men confirmed dead or reported missing were described as teenagers who hadn’t had a chance to live life yet and weren’t ready for war.

Some Russian officials doubled down on the decision to deploy conscripts at the border and said the country’s large conscript force should be used to repel the Ukrainian troops entrenching in Kursk.

“Everyone says, how can you use conscripts? This is our territory, and they’re our servicemen,” Andrei Gurulyov, a lawmaker from Putin’s United Russia party and former army officer, told Russian state TV on Tuesday. “I feel sorry for the boys, no doubt. But we used to always fight using them.”

Ukraine took control of hundreds of square miles of Russian territory, captured hundreds of prisoners and destroyed the Kremlin’s initial reinforcements.

Izmailova said her son, who grew up without a father after his parents divorced, dreamed of opening his own vehicle-repair shop in Perm and regularly told her he would earn enough money so she wouldn’t have to work into retirement on her meager Russian pension.

She reached out to other Russian mothers searching for sons who had also been conscripted and soon learned that they were afraid of going public. Russia has been silent about the fate of conscripts captured by Ukraine. Mothers whose sons have gone missing have said the military leadership is giving them no information.

But many have in recent days deleted social-media posts asking for news about their loved ones, after Russian authorities warned against such posts and blocked the page of a prominent search-and-rescue group in Kursk.

Izmailova decided to publish a petition addressed to Putin, so that other mothers could anonymously sign it. Posted on Aug. 12, it criticized Putin for allowing conscripts to serve near the combat zone, ordered a full investigation of what led to the decision and called for an immediate prisoner exchange that would free their sons, like the swaps made in the earlier stages of the war.

She decided that getting information about her son trumped other concerns. On Aug. 13, she also wrote a post on social media with a description of the events leading up to Izmailov’s disappearance.

“Please, if anyone knows anything about the circumstances of my son’s capture, get in touch,” Izmailova wrote. “I’m a single mother, and he’s my only son. Help, anyone who can.”

Izmailov’s capture, together with that of hundreds of other Russian soldiers, gives a boost to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a time of regular protests in Kyiv by the families of Ukrainian soldiers held in Russia, who demand greater efforts to return husbands and sons who in some cases have been imprisoned for years.

Zelensky has said the prisoners of war who surrendered in Kursk will be added to Ukraine’s exchange fund for future prisoner swaps. On Wednesday, Ukraine’s human-rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, said he had spoken to his Russian counterpart about the possibility of a prisoner exchange.

If Izmailov is indeed alive and in Ukrainian custody, it will likely be a while before he returns home. Captured Russian soldiers usually languish for months at detention facilities inside Ukraine, though many are allowed phone calls to their relatives, and Kyiv says it treats all of them humanely.

That is little consolation to his mother.

“I want him back,” Izmailova said. “And to just wake up from this terrible nightmare as soon as possible.”

ROBERT MCCONNELL
Co-Founder, U.S.-Ukraine Foundation
Director of External Affairs, Friends of Ukraine Network
The introduction is Mr. McConnell’s and does not necessarily represent the views of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation or the Friends of Ukraine Network (FOUN).

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