Had he been older or less vulnerable, says Ukrainian teenager Bohdan Yermokhin, he “would have set the Kremlin on fire”. Originally from the coastal city of.
Bohdan Yermokhin was taken at the age of 16 from his destroyed hometown of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine and forced by occupying Russian authorities to move to Moscow. On his 18th birthday, he got his wish and returned to Ukraine to pick up his life as an adult.
Russia is systematically deporting Ukrainian children from the occupied part of Ukraine against their will – which constitutes genocide according to one of the five definitions given in the United Nations' Genocide Convention. Once in Russia, Ukrainian children are held incommunicado, brainwashed with pro-Russian propaganda, and adopted by Russian families – even though they have living relatives in Ukraine who are their legal guardians. Nobody knows for sure how large this "stolen generation" of Ukrainian children is.