Illja Matviyenko, an 11-year-old Ukrainian boy, says he and his mother left the basement where they were sheltering one night to ask a neighbor for some water and food. But something happened: “We didn’t get to the neighbor. A rocket landed nearby. “Mom hit her forehead and died the next day,” he says.
The Ukrainian boy lived in Mariupol, a city located in the southeast of Ukraine that since February 24, 2022, was besieged for three months and almost completely destroyed by bombing by the Russian army, which killed thousands of people. civilians.
Among them was Illja’s mother, Nataliya Matviyenko, who died on March 21, 2022. The rocket also left him seriously injured in his right leg. Russian soldiers discovered him the next day and took him to a hospital in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, under Russian occupation.
Children kidnapped by Russia
Illja was going to be taken in by a Russian family, but his grandmother, who has lived since 2017 in Uzhhorod, the westernmost city in Ukraine, rescued him from Donetsk. Shortly after, the boy testified before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, testimony that contributed to the arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The boy is one of thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russian soldiers or officials in the occupied Ukrainian territories since February 2022. An official Ukrainian estimate puts the number of deported minors at around 19,000.
Maria Lvova-Belova, the presidential commissioner for children’s rights in Russia, boasted in 2023 that Russian authorities had already “rescued” 700,000 children from Ukraine. So far, Ukraine has only been able to bring back about 400 kidnapped children.
Aside from the numbers, it is one of the worst war crimes committed in Europe since the Second World War.
“These war crimes are neither a coincidence nor an accident. They are a method of Russia and a tactic of war against Ukraine. Children are sent to re-education camps. First they are told that they are Russians and that Russia is their homeland. They are then placed with Russian families. It is a policy of elimination of Ukrainian identity and a genocidal policy,” Oleksandra Matviichuk, Ukrainian lawyer, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, tells DW.
“Evacuation”
On the second day of the Russian attack on Mariupol, Illja and her mother fled to the city center. They lived for a few days in a hotel and later in an air raid shelter. At some point, her mother decided to return to her house, located on the outskirts, to look for food. When they arrived, they saw that almost everything was destroyed, but they managed to find another house with an intact basement and some food, where they hid for a few days until that fateful night when they came out.
The boy says he doesn’t remember exactly what his mother’s death was like, but he does know that she didn’t react. The Russian soldiers arrived the next day and simply said “Evacuation!”, and then loaded him into a vehicle: “The trip to the Donetsk hospital was terrible. My leg hurt so much that I can’t even describe it,” he said.
Already at the hospital, where he had surgery on his leg, Illja said he had a grandmother who could pick him up. But a few days later, the people at the hospital told him that they could take him to Moscow, to a new family: “I didn’t answer anything because I didn’t know if they would hurt me if I refused,” he said.
Grandma’s Odyssey
Illja details that many journalists went to film the hospital. By chance, Illja’s grandmother, Olena Matviyenko, saw a video on social media in which her grandson appeared. Immediately, she called the hospital and said she would come pick him up. Shortly after, she headed to Donetsk, passing through Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Russia.
Matviyenko can only tell a few details of his odyssey. At that time, the return of Illja and another girl was organized with the help of the Ukrainian government and a Russian businessman. In order not to jeopardize possible subsequent rescues, he could only reveal this: IIlja and her grandmother returned to Ukraine through Turkey at the end of April 2022: “I cried when I crossed the Ukrainian border with my grandson,” Matviyenko narrates.
This is my destiny”
Illja was rehabilitated in a hospital in the capital, kyiv. There, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked him if he would be willing to tell his story to investigators at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, something he agreed to.
The boy has also spoken with representatives of the UN and other Western politicians: “I understood that I had to do this. So that there is no indifference, so that they know that it is not a story, but that it really happened.”
Doesn’t it hurt a lot to retell the story over and over again? “No,” Illja replies. “I have realized that it is my destiny and that is why I do not cry. I have never cried when I have told it.”
“Maybe I’ll die. “This is war.”
Illja and her grandmother currently live in a kind of shared apartment in Uzhhorod; They don’t have their own bathroom. They would like to have a bathroom with a shower and would prefer to live in their own home. The boy adds: “I miss the sea, the pizza he bought every day on the way to school and the city. And, of course, to my mother. May God give him peace.”
The 11-year-old does not believe that the arrest warrant against Putin will help: “He is an idiot, but at least he knows that he can no longer travel anywhere.”
Illja would like to be a doctor when she grows up: “Although it would be my dream, I don’t know if I can be one, because I have hopelessness syndrome. Maybe I’ll die tomorrow. “That’s war.”
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