KIEV It all started with an attractive offer. Vitaly Vertash16, could go to a two-week camp on the Crimean peninsula.
The principal brought the good news. The school in Kherson would be closed for two weeks, and the schoolchildren would be able to relax at a camp on the shores of the Black Sea.
It was October 2022. Children could forget about the constant bombing for a while and focus on swimming and playing.
The arrangements were in a fire rush. Passports and the necessary documents had to be taken with you the next morning, the bus to the Crimean peninsula would leave at five in the morning.
Mum Inessa Vertash remembers being surprised at the hasty departure, but the possibility of getting the teenager out of the middle of the war, even for a little while, was attractive. Vitali packed his bag without hesitation.
The bus left. But two weeks stretched into almost half a year, and after the beginning the children practically had no chance to keep in touch with their families, let alone get home.
Russia’s large-scale operation to abduct Ukrainian children has been revealed during the past winter. According to its own words, Ukraine has been able to identify 16,500 children that Russia has kidnapped on its own soil. 300 of them have been successfully returned to their homes.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) found the figures presented by Ukraine credible and issued an arrest warrant for the Russian president About Vladimir Putin and the Russian Children’s Ombudsman Marija from Lvova-Belova in March.
Vitali and his classmates are among the children abducted by the Russians, and throughout the six-month abduction, the Russians tried to forcibly Russianize Vitali and the other children they abducted with him.
We meet the Vertash family in a cheap hotel on the outskirts of Kyiv in April. A real, smart-looking boy meets us in the lower hall.
The family moved to Kyiv a couple of weeks ago, around the same time as Vitali was released. Life in Kherson in the middle of the bombings became difficult, when the water and electricity were still cut off from the household.
One room in this modest hotel now serves as a home for six people.
Honey names in the camps
Today we have an opportunity to visit the center of Kyiv, and Vitali and Inessa’s mother will go there with us. They are now visiting the sights of their own country’s capital for the first time.
On the way, Vitali tells his nightmarish story.
The Crimean summer camp was called Unelma, and in the beginning it lived up to its name. The first two weeks went well. The children were able to go on the promised swimming trips regularly.
But Unelma was followed by a camp called Friendship. That was not supposed to be part of the program.
There, the terrifying truth about the Russians’ arrangements was revealed to the children. The Russian national anthem plays from the loudspeakers every morning.
– Lessons were organized for us in which we were told that there are terrorists and Nazis in Ukraine. They said President Zelensky was a drug addict, Vitali says.
In the new camp, connections to home were almost completely cut off. The camp staff took the Ukrainian SIM cards from the students’ cell phones.
That’s when Vitali also realized why the camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The camp management wanted to keep the children in the camp at any cost.
The going became more and more brutal.
– In class, we were told that we would be taken to Russia, because no one in Ukraine cares about us. They also said that our own parents have abandoned us.
The youngest campers were five years old.
From nicking to solitary confinement
At some point, life in the camp started to feel overwhelming for Vitali.
– I started to believe that I would never get home again. I was afraid that I would be taken to Russia. That would have been the end of everything, Vitali recalls now, serious next to his mother.
Vitali finally tried to escape from the camp with his comrade. They got caught.
When Vitali secretly listened to the Ukrainian national anthem after the escape attempt, the physical punishment began.
– We were taken to a special cell in the basement for four days. We only got food in the evenings.
According to Vitali, at least two students were beaten with sticks. The caning came as a punishment when one refused to sing the occupier’s national anthem and the other uttered the forbidden words Slava Ukraini!, meaning glory to Ukraine.
According to Vitali, the children who were already pro-Russia got in easier. They got better food than others and lived in different premises.
– They had renovated rooms. We didn’t even have beds or proper bedding, we slept on dirty mattresses on the concrete floor.
Vitali remains silent and then adds:
– We were treated like animals, dogs.
Sometimes, rarely, one of the children managed to contact their home, Vitalik. He wanted to spare his parents and did not tell about all the horrors in the phone calls.
So Inessa’s mother was not aware of what her son had to go through in Crimea, but she could guess.
– I cried every day and every night for the whole six months, says Inessa Vertash.
He says that he won’t forget one of Vitali’s last phone calls from the camp.
– Mother, this is not a camp. This is a concentration camp! Vitali had gotten better.
Inessa Vertash pressured the principal who organized the trip to take a break. But he didn’t listen to the concerns and stated that the children were lying about the conditions of the camp in order to get home.
The headmaster also said that he had been to the camp and was able to prove with his own eyes that the children’s talk was baseless.
– I visited the principal many times every day. I was furious and used language I never thought I was capable of.
Vertash says that he told the principal, for example, that he would flay him alive if something happened to the boy.
For a long time, the principal did not take responsibility for sending the children to the camp. The Russians withdrew from Kherson in November, just one month after the children had been sent to Crimea.
The principal disappeared with the Russians.
In March 2023, Vitali Vertash’s ordeal was finally over. The unyielding mother and the Save Ukraine organization got Vitali and 14 other students back to their home country.
– I was so happy when we crossed the border. Now I just try to forget everything that happened. I no longer have to wake up in the morning to the Russian national anthem, Vitali says.
The Save Ukraine organization tells via email that no ransom money is paid for the freed children, and the organization does not negotiate with Russia. The operation is based on voluntary helpers.
The organization does not reveal its exact operating methods, but says that it costs at least $1,500 to get one child home. Bus trips, hotel stays, meals and other practical arrangements are mandatory expenses.
According to its own words, the organization has managed to rescue 95 children kidnapped by the Russians in a total of five operations. The organization is aware of at least seven Russian settlements that still have children kidnapped by the Russians.
The children have been picked up from Crimea by traveling through Belarus and Russia. The parents or other relatives of the abducted child travel on the organization’s bus and return home to Ukraine with the child.
Mother and son look at the sights of the capital city of Kyiv and take pictures of each other. The teenager is not ashamed to walk next to his mother. After a long separation, it seems to be good to be together.
Vitali gets a hotdog from the street grill, and for the first time a smile appears on the boy’s face.
When the war ends, the Vertas plan to return to their home in Kherson. There are friends and relatives, there are roots.
Still, it may not be an easy return home. The school where Vitali’s childhood ended is also located in Hersoniss.