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** “If the whole world could hear me, I would say that we need to win this war as soon as possible so that all children can see their families again…” - Those words come from 12-year-old Sashko from the southeast Ukrainian city of Mariupol, who was separated from his mother by Russians during the so-called “filtration” procedure in the Donetsk region.**

Sashko is one of the thousands of children taken to the Russian Federation from the occupied regions of Ukraine under the guise of evacuation and ensuing rehabilitation ,to teach them to “love Russia.”

On March 17, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia, Maria Lvova-Belova. They are suspected of facilitating the forced deportation of children from the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories, violating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

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**How Russian “filtration” works **

Last spring, Sashko was cooking with his mother Snizhana over a fire in partially occupied Mariupol. The shelling started, they did not have time to run to the shelter, and a piece of shrapnel hit the boy in the eye. In search of medical care, his mother took him to the Ilyich steel plant, where Ukrainian military doctors treated the wounded.

The Russian military took the boy’s mother for re-interrogation. He never saw her again.

But later, the occupiers took them prisoner and sent them to a filtration camp in Donetsk Oblast. There, Sashko and his mother were met by representatives of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations and registered. After that, the Russian military took the boy’s mother, to interrogate her further. He never saw her again.

Sashko was held in the “republican trauma center” for two months until he found a way to call his grandmother, who eventually managed to take him away.

Doctors now say that Sashko won’t be able to out of his injured eye. The fate of Sashko’s mother, Snizhana, is still unknown.

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Rhetorics such as “your parents don’t need you” and “you don’t have a future in Ukraine” is one of the propaganda methods used by Russians with Ukrainian children living in Russian-occupied regions, or who have been taken to Russia.

“They say that Ukraine has abandoned you; they teach you to hate your parents, then your country, and then to love Russia,” says lawyer Myroslava Kharchenko.

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“Whenever they played the Russian anthem, we would put on our headphones and listen to the Ukrainian anthem,” says 16-year-old Vitaliy, who was sent to a camp in Crimea last fall.

“On New Year’s Eve, we had to watch Putin’s address, and some of us left the room and started shouting 'Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!” says Taisiya, 16 too. She says that children who disobeyed their teachers were locked up for several days in an “isolation room.”

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“On some of the Ukrainian territories, children have lived under Russian propaganda for eight years. They are taught to see Ukraine as an enemy,” says Aksana Filipishyna. Such measures can contribute to the fact that, in a few years, these children will end up hating their homeland. Like, for example, this 20-year-old soldier I met at one of the checkpoints in occupied Donetsk last fall. He was born there. When the war started in 2014, he was 11 years old, almost like Sashko from Mariupol. Now he is convinced that he is fighting for his homeland and against the Nazis. He grew up on Russian propaganda.

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