It’s hard to know how to react when your child runs after younger children saying: ...

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“It’s hard to know how to react when your child runs after younger children saying, ‘I’ll eat a little Moskal’”

Since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian authorities have been transferring Ukrainian children to Russia en masse and doing everything they can to prevent them from returning home or make them unwilling to do so: placing them with other families, granting them citizenship through an expedited process, and giving them lessons in patriotic education.

One such child was Filipp Golovnya from Mariupol, who was adopted in 2022 by Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s presidential commissioner for children’s rights.

This is how journalists Nina Nazarova and Svyatoslav Khomenko tell his story in their book “Stolen Childhood” (published by Meduza’s publishing house with the participation of the StraightForward Foundation).

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In the fall of 2022, Filipp gave an interview to the far-right propaganda channel Tsargrad. The filming was conducted with the permission of Lvova-Belova or her press office and probably under their supervision. The teenager said he had never known his father and that his mother had died of lung cancer when he was 11. For the next few years, he lived with his stepfather — his mother’s former husband, who had formally become his guardian — and his stepfather’s new wife. After the invasion began, the teenager said, his stepfather threw him out of the house. Ukrainian investigative journalists who spoke to people who knew Filipp and his guardians personally in Mariupol believe this story was invented by propagandists.

Golovnya and Lvova-Belova met in May, when Filipp and other children from Mariupol were taken to the Polyany boarding house outside Moscow. “One boy immediately captured my heart. I felt as if he were my own. I think the feeling was mutual. Although he behaved like an ordinary teenager who supposedly didn’t need any of this at all,” the official said. “Besides the feeling that this is someone very close to me, there’s another motive. Placing children with families is my professional work. It seems to me that it wouldn’t be quite right if I didn’t personally take part in any way.”

After they met, Maria Lvova-Belova took the boy shopping. In an interview with British documentary filmmaker Shahida Tulaganova in the fall of 2023 (which was allowed to take place only in the presence of Lvova-Belova’s press secretary), Filipp recalled: “That day she got me a whole outfit, shoes and all. She bought me perfume. I was really excited. And she says to me, ‘Filipp, would you like to come visit us this weekend?’ I was like, ‘Seriously? Really? I’d love to.’”

“Well, buddy, that’s it, I thought to myself, you’re in trouble,” the teenager added. “People back home won’t understand.”

On his first evening at Lvova-Belova’s home, they watched “Shrek.” According to her, Filipp didn’t come out for dinner for a long time, so she went into his new room. “He was sitting on the bed like a little sparrow, crying,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Filipp, what’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘You see, I have nothing in this life, I have no homeland, I have no loved ones, I have no future, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next.’ And at that moment I realized we had done everything right.”

“I had a breakdown, an absolutely massive one,” the teenager said in the interview with the British documentary filmmaker. “I’d never felt so bad in my life. I was drowning in tears. Then Maria Alekseyevna came and comforted me.”

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In April, Lvova-Belova said she couldn’t call life with Filipp “smooth.” “It’s hard to know how to react when your child runs after younger children saying, ‘I’ll eat a little Moskal,’ but I understand that this isn’t about him; it’s because of the eight years of anti-Russian propaganda that there was in Mariupol. But we love each other now. My son has started calling me ‘Mom,’” she said.

Filipp, who is now an adult, lives separately and is studying law at a Russian university.

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Nina Nazarova and Svyatoslav Khomenko’s book “Stolen Childhood” can be purchased at this link.