The Russian occupation radio and newspaper ads promoted the camps as a summer break from the war for Ukrainian children under their control, free of charge. Hundreds of families agreed in the occupied east and the south, Ukrainian officials and parents say. One bus convoy left Izium at the end of August, with the promise that the children would return home in time for the school year. Instead, Ukrainian forces swept though in early September, driving the Russians into a disorganized retreat and liberating territory that had been in enemy hands for months. Fifty-two children from Izium and around 250 more from other towns in the Kharkiv region, all between the ages of 9 and 16, are now scattered in camps, according to a Ukrainian intelligence official and a mother who hitchhiked into Russia to retrieve her daughter. Both, like nearly everyone involved in the issue, spoke on condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive and fraught situation. “Our main goal was to give the children a break from everything that was happening here, from all the horrors that were here,” said Valeriya Kolesnyk, an Izium teacher whose 9-year-old is now in Russia. “The problem is that the Russian side does not plan to return the children to us.” That doesn’t seem to have been the initial expectation. Kolesnyk said she had sent her elder daughter to a camp in July and the girl returned home with no complications. The shifting front lines changed everything. About two dozen parents gathered Wednesday outside a closed café in Izium overlooking one of the town’s countless bombed out buildings. Desperate, angry and almost crazed with worry, they say they need more help to retrieve their kids. They are afraid they are seen as collaborators, willing participants in handing their children over to the enemy. “We are simple people. We could never afford a seaside holiday for our children and we saw this as a chance,” said one Izium father who has a 9-year-old child among the group. No town official was present at Wednesday’s gathering. The Washington Post first reported on the stranded children last week, but AP was able to learn the magnitude of the issue after speaking with 20 parents and officials in both Russia and Ukraine. Families of the missing children said the Izium couple who organized the trip now tell them Ukraine is too dangerous for children. The couple are planning a permanent future in Russia. “I’m not going back,” said the husband, Valeriy Polyvoda, reached by phone in Russia. Polyvoda blamed the children’s plight on local authorities in Russia. He refused to say how many children were with him. One mother managed to hitchhike to Zaporizhzhia, got permission from Ukrainian authorities to cross into Russian-controlled territories, hitchhiked her way to Crimea and across to Russia all the way to Gelendzhik, the seaside resort town where many of the children remain to this day. There she found her daughter, but camp authorities refused to give her permission to take her daughter away. They told her: “We will not allow you to take your child to Ukraine.” She signed a document promising to stay in Russia, picked up the girl and managed to get both of them out the same way she came, through the occupied territories, the war zone […]

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