Three Russian soldiers forcibly entered Vladyslav Rudenko’s home in October 2022. He was only 16. They had guns.
“Pack up your clothes and personal items,” they said. He wasn’t allowed to leave a note to his mother. No calls to relatives. No clues about his destination.
Moscow occupied Rudenko’s city of Kherson, Ukraine, a week after the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Soldiers detained hundreds and tortured dozens of people in the city. Then Russian authorities began targeting the kids.
The officers ordered Rudenko onto one of 17 buses filled with Ukrainian children. They started driving. When the bus reached Crimea, the southern peninsula illegally annexed by the Russians in 2014, border officials stamped Rudenko’s documents. He looked at the stamps. There was an entrance date. No exit date.
That’s when he knew.
“We understood at that point that we might never come back,” Rudenko told Christianity Today.
There is no way to know exactly how many children Russians have abducted from Ukraine. The Ukrainian government estimates nearly 20,000 have been taken. Russia places the number much higher—claiming 700,000. Moscow insists these aren’t abductions, though, but humanitarian efforts, offering children a reprieve from war. Some were supposedly going to summer camps but then didn’t return to their parents in the fall.
Russian families have illegally adopted some of the children.
Others appear to be living in reeducation facilities. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab has identified more than 8,400 children living in at least 57 locations scattered across occupied Ukrainian territory, Russia, and Belarus. Some are in Russian military training centers—or worse, fighting against their own country, according to the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.
Christians are part of the efforts to bring kids back home, said Mykola Kuleba, an evangelical Christian and founder of Save Ukraine. His Kyiv-based humanitarian organization has a wide range of support, but Christians play a significant role, he noted.
Kuleba is careful not to share the logistics of his organization’s “underground railroad,” but he said it’s a tedious and expensive process. Save Ukraine has rescued more than 600 children so far, about half the total number of children who have been returned home to Ukraine.
Rudenko was one of them.
In May, he and his mother, Tetiana Bodak, joined Kuleba in Washington, DC, where they met with American lawmakers. They urged US officials to make the return of children abducted in the war a nonnegotiable term of any cease-fire agreement. The International Criminal Court has said Russia’s child abductions should be considered a war crime.
Rudenko was eager to tell his story to anyone who would listen. The buses took him to a camp in Crimea called Druzhba, he said. Russian officers told the new arrivals to throw away anything promoting Ukrainian identity. Rudenko recalled one teenage girl who defied orders and wore a T-shirt with the words Glory to Ukraine. A military officer cut the shirt off of her.
The daily routine included morning assemblies around the flagpole with a Russian flag. There were Russian propaganda videos, Rudenko said, and lessons about Moscow’s importance on the global stage and about how Ukraine would soon be part of Russia—also how their Ukrainian identity had been “upgraded” to Russian.
The daily dose of propaganda convinced some Ukrainian kids that their families didn’t want them anymore, Rudenko said. They said they wouldn’t want to go home.
Rudenko refused to embrace a Russian identity. One day at dusk, he snuck outside, carefully avoiding the camp guards, and pulled down the Russian flag
“For everything that Russia did to my mother, to my family, and to me,” he told CT, “I just took it down and put my underwear there.”
The soldiers put him in solitary confinement for seven days, he said. It was a tiny room with a small window. They gave him pills they said would “calm him down.” Rudenko flushed them down the toilet.
In the spring, authorities transferred him to a military academy. He and 800 Ukrainian boys learned to handle weapons and operate drones and tanks. The officers tried to turn them into Russian soldiers.
Before Rudenko could be sent to the battlefield, though, his mother began working with Save Ukraine. They drafted a rescue plan that involved extensive paperwork (required by Russian authorities to prove parental rights) and thousands of miles of travel.
Rudenko was only 60 miles from home, but a direct trip would have required travel through war zones and difficult security corridors. Instead, Bodak made a circular trip across Ukraine’s eastern border into Poland, then north into Belarus, through Russia, and southwest into Lazurne in occupied Ukraine.
When Rudenko’s mother arrived at the military camp, Russian authorities interrogated her for three days and threatened her with 25 years in jail.
Anastasia Dovbnia, Save Ukraine’s international relations manager, said Russian officers required the mother and son to state in a recorded interview their support for Russia’s occupation and their fear of returning to Ukraine—lies they manufactured to secure their freedom.
“They’re still using pieces of this interview and circulating it all over to promote this false narrative of rescuing these kids,” Dovbnia said.
Rudenko and his mother made it home to Kherson in May 2023, seven months after Rudenko was taken, six months after Ukrainian forces reclaimed the city from Russian control.
Rudenko is glad to be home, but he worries about the fate of those he left behind, including friends he made at the military camp who might already be on the battlefield.
Dovbnia said some of them may have gone willingly due to years of indoctrination. “When you’re a kid, when you’re being told you’re an orphan and your family abandoned you and your homeland abandoned you, you are very prone to trust anybody who is providing you with any help,” she added.
During the second round of cease-fire negotiations in early June, Ukraine’s delegation delivered Moscow a list of 339 abducted children Ukraine wants to see immediately returned—a small percentage of the total but an achievable number in the near term. The United States has expressed its support for the return of Ukrainian children.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has suggested he is open to a third round of negotiations after Moscow and Kyiv complete a prisoner exchange next week, but he has not publicly committed to honoring Ukraine’s request. Meanwhile, Moscow has plans to continue deporting Ukrainian children to “summer camps” in the months ahead.
“We need strong US support,” Save Ukraine founder Kuleba said. “And the support of Christians who will pray for us, who will stand with us, who will support innocent children just to survive—to find them and to return them to their families.”
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