‘I was abducted by Russia with my 11-year old brother

Kseniia’s little brother would not hug her when she came to rescue him from the Russians.

When she walked through the door, Sergii, 11, would not look her in the eye and turned his body away from her.

“I don’t want to return because in Ukraine, the Nazis will kill me,” he told her, repeating himself over and over. “I want to stay in Russia because no one wanted me in Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian siblings were among the thousands abducted by Russia and taken across the border since Moscow’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022.

In an incredible story of bravery and perseverance, Kseniia, now 20, managed to find her stolen brother and worked to bring both of them home. They are, in a way, some of the luckier victims. An estimated 19,500 children are thought to have been stolen, while 1.6 million more are currently forced to live under occupation.

Children who have made it back have talked of being strip-searched, trained to handle guns and taught to fear adults.

“I promised myself… I can do this and take him [back],” she says, speaking to The i Paper in London as part of a delegation from Ukraine speaking to journalists and MPs to raise awareness of Russia’s documented forced abductions of children.

‘They had brainwashed my brother’

In August 2022, Russian troops came to the small town of Vovchansk in Kharkiv.
It was destroyed, and its population of 17,500 dropped to just 300.

It is where the pair had lived with a foster family since being taken into care. Their father was absent, and their mother could no longer care for them.

This difficult childhood meant that the brother and sister were close despite the seven-year age gap.

Kseniia had recently turned 18 when the men came. They grabbed her and took her to a dormitory in Shebekino, Russia. She was told she must not speak Ukrainian and to take tests to get Russian qualifications ready to spend the rest of her life in this enemy country.

But worse for Kseniia was that her brother had been torn away from her. Sergii was placed around 1,000km (620 miles) away in a so-called summer camp in Gelendzhik, Krasnodar Krai. He was there for two to three weeks before he was placed with a Russian family nearby.

Sergii found himself in this resort town nestled on the Black Sea, which boasts three water parks and a large, sandy beach. It is not difficult to imagine the pull such a sunny and fun place would have on an 11-year-old boy – especially after living under falling bombs.

Over the next eight months, his new mother and father told him he should be afraid of Ukraine, that Russia was his home now, and to forget his only family member.

“I understand how Russians use propaganda and [had] brainwashed him,” Kseniia, now 20, reflects.

“It was a very horrible time for me. I didn’t understand what I could do to rescue him and to [bring us] together”.

Now, sitting in this newspaper’s office, Kseniia looks like any typical young woman in her twenties: Her hair is carefully straightened, her nails are manicured, and she scrolls on her phone to pass the time. While English is not her first language, she speaks with confidence and a level of composure that does not betray her own traumatic experiences.

It is only when she thinks back to when she was confronted with the sight of her brother poisoned against her and their home that her anger shows.

“I wanted to kill them.

“The Russians wanted to make a child angry and to [turn on] their country.”

It is not the bombing, the sheltering in the shed where the family grew potatoes, or the moment it was first confirmed war had broken out that was the worst for Kseniia. The nine months the siblings spent apart, and the brainwashing of Sergii is what haunts her.

“We were taken against our will,” she says, plainly. “It was a very horrible time for me. The most bad time of my life.”

‘I’m Ukrainian – I don’t want to be Russian’

Kseniia was technically an adult when she was snatched, having celebrated her 18th birthday the month before. Her date of birth protected her from the Kremlin’s carefully engineered system to absorb Ukrainian children into Russian society.

This Russification of children was documented by the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, a unit of investigators terminated by the Trump administration before being granted a six-week lifeline following this paper’s reporting.

The team documented how Ukrainian children have been taken across Russia and, given new names and passports and formally adopted into families after periods in care or, like Sergii, placed with foster families.

While the clock ticked on her brother’s fate, Kseniia worked to free herself from the institution she had been placed in.

“The Russian teachers and administration said I must take a Russian passport… they said ‘you can have money and a house, and you can stay in Russia and have a great future’,” she says. “I say no. No, I don’t want this because I want to come back to Ukraine. I am Ukrainian, and I don’t want to be Russian.”

She says she was “kicked out” after three months due to her fierce pushback.

“I was nervous as I did not know what tomorrow would bring [and] I was really scared. I did not have people who could help me and my brother was in another city with a Russian family.”

Kseniia was able to call and message her little brother. She asked him if he wanted to come back to Ukraine if she could find a way to do it.

“Yes, I just want to come back with you,” he replied immediately.

Through Save Ukraine, a charity based in Kyiv set up to help bring children back home from Russia, she was able to secure the documents she needed and established a plan on how she could extract her brother from his forced abduction.

Kseniia can’t share many of the specific details of how this plan came together for security reasons. The fear is that if the Russians know how rescue missions like this are organised, they could prevent future operations, and it could jeopardise the rescue of other stolen children.

Eventually, the day came when almost everything was ready.

But disaster struck. She called Sergii to tell him the good news and then lost contact with him.

“In this moment, this family took out all [my] contact with him,” she says. “I knew only the city where he was… [now it was] even harder to find him.”

She was able to track down the Russian foster family through social services and confronted them, saying she would be coming to take her brother. These would-be parents stone-walled Kseniia and tried to isolate Sergii from his only family member. They were older, perhaps in their fifties, Kseniia thinks, and they were mean and unwilling to help.

“I said I have the document[s]. I want to take my brother back to Ukraine, and I am ready to go to you. They said to me, ‘We are talking with your brother, and he doesn’t want to come back… he wants to stay in Russia forever’.”

‘He didn’t want to hug me’

With much perseverance and help from the Ukrainian social services and the team at Save Ukraine, she finally managed to meet Sergii in person, but it was not the reunion she had dreamt of. Instead of running into her arms, he turned away.

“I was very upset when he didn’t even want to hug me. It was as if he was intimidated. He was very withdrawn and almost never made eye contact, but only kept repeating that he didn’t want to go to Ukraine,” she says.

“We spoke for three hours… my brother repeated and repeated ‘I don’t want to return because in Ukraine’, ‘these Nazis [will] kill me’, ‘I want to stay in Russia because no one wanted me in Ukraine but here I am good.”

It was a shock. Kseniia could not undo eight months of indoctrination in such a short time but gave him an offer. Sergii should return for one month, and if he did not like it, he could return to his Russian family.

This, along with gentle reassurance, meant the 11-year-old slowly warmed back up to his sister. He was able to find his way back to his own thoughts he’d expressed in that early phone call: he did want to return to Ukraine.

They grabbed Sergii’s meagre belongings and began the tense journey back through Russia to reach their home in Kharkiv.

Kseniia had been advised to lie to anyone who asked why they were travelling. The length of the journey meant they crossed multiple border checkpoints. Each one was terrifying.

At each crossing, the young woman was faced with the intimidating figure of a border guard. Kseniia had to pretend to be happy and hide that they were trying to flee the country. If she failed, she knew they would be detained.

Kseniia just kept focused on staying strong for her brother and their escape mission. The horror of what would happen if they were caught and separated once again was too much to think about. It would almost certainly mean she would never see her brother ever again.

The journey was gruelling and took days. But finally, after many hours of travel, they made it.
Sergii now lives with a Ukrainian foster family, and Kseniia sees him regularly. At the same time, she is studying to become a journalist. She works as an ambassador for all deported Ukrainian children at Save Ukraine, the organisation that she credits with helping to save her and her brother.

“Russia erases our identity and erases my country,” she says just before she dons her puffer jacket to head outside.

“Russians want to make every Ukrainian child a Russian child. This Russian foster family wanted to make him officially a Russian child and for him to stay and live with them forever.”

But, she adds, they did not count on young people like her refusing to give up.