Russian military man tries to adopt child from boarding school in occupied Kherson region

Russian military man Denis Volkov has appealed to a court controlled by the Russian Federation in order to adopt a child from an orphanage in the city of Oleshky.

He told Russian media about this.

The publication reveals that the girl’s name is Karina. Denis Volkov said that she misses the past and sometimes wakes up at night.

In December 2025, the Russian Ministry of Labor and Social Protection granted Volkov the status of her “temporary guardian”. The man claims that the child already lives in his family.

Previously, journalists from Suspilny revealed several cases of adoption of Ukrainian children by Russian military personnel. Myroslava Kharchenko, a lawyer for the Save Ukraine Foundation, said that legally, Russian families are trying to hide the fact of illegal adoption by changing all available information about the child, including the name.

“The scariest thing is that now a significant part of adoptive parents are families of participants in hostilities against Ukraine. And transferring children there definitely does not meet their best interests. They need to be identified and returned as soon as possible,” said Kateryna Rashevska, an expert at the regional human rights center.

On Russian adoption websites, journalists found children from an orphanage in Kherson. The names and ages of some children have been changed on the website. For example, the new Russian name and age of one child differ from her Ukrainian state documents. Another child’s Ukrainian name was replaced with its Russian version. There is no mention of the Ukrainian origin of any of them.