Ukraine war: Mothers get their children back from Russia

When 15-year-old Sasha Kraynyuk studied the photograph handed to him by Ukrainian investigators, he recognised the boy dressed in Russian military uniform immediately.

The teenager sitting at a school desk has the Z-mark of Russia's war emblazoned on his right sleeve, coloured in the red, white and blue of the Russian flag.

But the boy's name is Artem, and he's Ukrainian.

Sasha and Artem were among 13 children taken from their own school in Kupyansk, north-eastern Ukraine last September by armed Russian soldiers in balaclavas. Ushered onto a bus with shouts of "Quickly!", they then disappeared for weeks without trace.

When the children, who all have special educational needs, were finally allowed to call home, it was from much deeper inside Russian-occupied territory.

To get them back, their relatives were forced to make gruelling journeys across thousands of miles into the country that has declared war on them. Only eight of the children have been returned from Perevalsk so far and Artem was one of the last, collected by his mother just this spring.

When I reached the school's director by phone, she saw no problem with dressing Ukrainian children in the uniform of an invading army.

"So what?" Tatyana Semyonova retorted. "What can I do? What's it to do with me?"

I countered that the Z symbolised the war against the children's own country. "So what?" the director demanded again. "What kind of a question is that? No-one is forcing them."

BBC