Stranded or displaced by the bombs, relocated to countries during sometimes poorly supervised initiatives and via border areas haunted by traffickers, the tens of thousands of children placed in institutions in Ukraine, whose life was precarious before the war , are in a “chaotic” situation, alert NGOs and experts.
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Ukraine is an extraordinary case, with the largest number in Europe of children placed (estimated at at least 100,000 by the UNHCR) in a vast closed and often dysfunctional network of orphanages, boarding schools, or institutions for the handicapped.
So there were “tens of thousands of children living in these institutions before the war, it’s huge …”, observes Geneviève Colas, coordinator of the collective “Together against human trafficking” for Secours Catholique Caritas France.
For most of them, the situation today is “chaotic”, confided to AFP Halyna Kurylo, representative in Ukraine of the human rights group “Disability Rights International” (DRI). “Many institutions were evacuated in a haphazard way; some children are left out because they cannot move due to their disability. Institutions have joined the west of the country and merged with others, the places must be overcrowded… In the confusion, children can get lost”.
On February 25, a “baby home” (children aged 0 to 4) welcoming 55 children in Vorzel suffered a Russian bombardment. “Fortunately, the children and the staff were not in the affected building,” says Halyna Postoliuk, director for Ukraine of the NGO “Hope and Homes for Children”.
The decision to evacuate was not made that day. Then the intensity of the strikes made it impossible. Finally, on March 9, the 55 children and 26 supervisors were evacuated to the children’s hospital in Kyiv, then to the West.
For a group of children aged 5 to 14 from an institution in Nijine, it is an odyssey of almost 1,000 km, from the east to the west of Ukraine, carried out a dozen years ago. days to flee the bombs, says by telephone Marieta, the director (who did not wish to give her last name) of the institution.
1,000 km by bus
This center welcomes children whose families are unable to take care of them due to poverty, alcoholism or drug problems.
“The Russians started to get closer; the children heard shots, detonations. It’s traumatic for them…” Some relatives pick up the children, but for seven of them, it is impossible to pick them up because of access problems. The authorities decide to evacuate them in a bus with drawn curtains and regroup them with another institution in Nijni Vorota, 24 hours away by bus, near the Slovak border.
“The children did not see houses destroyed, people killed; fortunately…”, relates Marieta. “Three days after we left, the Russians closed in on Nijine. We couldn’t have left the city if we had stayed longer”.
Besides the danger of fighting, other perils threaten these children.
In Ukraine, these institutions form “a huge disorganized system with little control; in the chaos of this war, children are easy prey for criminal organizations,” warns Eric Rosenthal, founder and CEO of DRI.
Ukraine has been a source of concern for years and has been the scene of abuse in some orphanages (forced daily labor in private homes to do housework, sexual exploitation, etc.).
Before the war, in this poor country, charges of trafficking for illegal adoption or organ trafficking had emerged, adds Mr. Rosenthal.
To justify his fears, he cites the example of 2014, during the war in Crimea: “children disappeared from orphanages and were brought to Russia. Others had been moved inside Ukraine without being identified”.
In recent weeks, “we have learned that children are transferred from orphanages to neighboring countries such as Romania and Moldova; but there is also a big traffic problem in these two countries!” he worries.
Some 70,000 institutionalized children lived in areas that have been or have been under fire since the Russian invasion began on February 24, according to the NGO network Ukrainian Child Rights Network (UCRN).
Around 31,000 children who still had parents or legal representatives have returned home, but their situation is alarming if these people are unable to receive them properly.
“It’s crazy!”
Joined in Lviv (western Ukraine), Colleen Holt Thompson, 55, American from Kentucky and regular volunteer in Ukraine since 2006 with orphanages via a network of American adoptive parents, cries from the heart to AFP . Adoptive mother of six Ukrainians, she arrived urgently in Lviv on March 3 to help evacuate orphans and continue her adoption procedure for a teenager, Maure, launched three years ago.
The “chaos” of the evacuation of many orphans abroad stunned her.
According to official figures from the end of March, 3,000 foster children were transferred abroad, mainly to Poland, Germany, Italy, Romania, Austria and the Czech Republic.
“No government is prepared for such large-scale evacuations,” acknowledges Ms. Thompson. “But my concerns were heightened when I received calls from people in administrations asking if we had the names and ages of children who were traveling to Lviv by bus or train and of whom they had no record of identity, nor of their companions…”.
She also claims to have received “disturbing” calls from someone asking her for a list of children from an orphanage that her network was trying to evacuate from Mariupol, including children involved in adoptions in the United States. “This person was saying that they could evacuate these children to Greece via a private jet… it’s crazy! There are really serious concerns about child trafficking.”
She is also alarmed at the number of children evacuated “to other European countries in families they do not know and who have not been checked”.
“I tell you, there are children who will never return to Ukraine, others who will be lost, and there are currently thousands of children in hotels, camps, private homes, with people whose we do not know if they are trained or simply trusted, ”she says.
Placed in an orphanage at the age of 4, Maure (who has just turned 18) has already experienced in 2014 during the Crimean War a traumatic evacuation from her orphanage in Donetsk when she was 10 years old. In the aftermath of the outbreak of the Russian invasion, she was again evacuated through the war to Lviv to another orphanage — and her bunker when the sirens sounded — but was not allowed to stay with Ms Thompson. “The director of the establishment wants to evacuate him with the other children in Austria …”, she is moved.
Since March 12, rules have been imposed by the government for the evacuation and monitoring of these groups of children, but much remains to be done, according to the NGOs.
According to the UCRN, 2,500 children urgently need to be evacuated from combat zones. “In fact, these evacuations take place when the fighting is most intense; the children are terrified, the older ones try to reassure the younger ones,” says Darya Kasyanova, program director at the NGO SOS Children’s Villages Ukraine.
“The supervisors note a setback in the development of these children, who eat little and sleep badly”.
“House vs. Sex”
Risky situations are also at the borders.
Thomas Hackl, from Caritas Romania, who opened a center at the Siret border point, testifies that his team recently stopped a man who was trying to take two young Ukrainian women to Italy.
“We know that traffickers mingle with the population, offering a means of transport. There were many signs that led us not to trust this man: he insisted too much, he wanted to take them to a specific place and not somewhere else… There are many stories like this around here “.
At border crossings and in the countries through which they transit, these children face the risk of finding themselves in a car with a stranger, and also that of accommodation, with the risk of becoming “a little domestic slave” or to be sexually exploited, emphasizes Ms. Colas.
From the beginning of the war, Caritas collected testimonies from people passing through Poland and who were offered “shelter against sexual exploitation, + house against sex +”.
Reached by AFP on the border between Ukraine and Moldova, Yuri Tsitrinbaum, of the NGO IsraAID which has been providing aid there since the end of February, explains that the first three weeks of the war, the situation was “chaotic at the border point of Palanca because of the “very large number of people crossing”. The situation has “calmed down” but “there are more and more concerns (…) on the issue of human trafficking”.
In Nizhny Vorota, Marieta hopes that the situation will remain calm and has no intention of leaving Ukraine for the moment. “Our country is very close to our hearts.”
When asked what she will do with the children if the Russian forces approach her city of refuge, she says: “It’s better not to think about it”.