Employees of the Kherson orphanage hid children in the basement of the church, trying to protect them from the Russians

The Russia are openly engaged in the deportation and kidnapping of Ukrainians in the temporarily occupied territories. Such a fate also befell the children from the Kherson orphanage, whose teachers hid in the basement of the church until agents of the Russian special service visited there.

After the start of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine in February 2022, the employees of the Kherson orphanage began to think of ways to protect the pupils from the war.

As they told the journalists, all the children, mostly under the age of 5, were moved to the Golgotha ​​Church at the other end of the city, said an employee of the orphanage named Olena.

The church and the teachers of the orphanage took care of the children in the basement. They hid them there to protect them from the Russians.

“Yes, the children were here. But after the Russians occupied this city, they started asking questions,” said Viktor, a 74-year-old church caretaker.

According to him, a few weeks later, FSB agents came and demanded that the teachers take the children back to the orphanage.

In occupied Kherson, the Russians did not hide their intentions, seeking to steal children from the Kherson orphanage. Instead, they loudly “advertised” the deportation of small Ukrainians.

According to Elena, the nurses wrote the children’s names on their jackets or on their arms so that they would be called by their real names wherever they were. The occupiers said they were taking them to the Crimea. However, it is not clear where exactly they ended up.

Ukrainian investigators reported that orphaned children taken from the occupied territory were also sent to the Russian Federation, where they were granted citizenship and handed over to Russian families.

“They do not deserve our children. They should return them,” Olena emphasized.

The arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin is the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) “first shot” at what could be a substantive indictment against him, Ukraine’s top government lawyer Ben Emmerson said.

The arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to Russian President Vladimir Putin is valid for life. He will remain a suspect until he is brought to trial or acquitted.