Wounded in the eye from an explosion, Oleksandr Radchuk, an 11-year-old Ukrainian boy from the destroyed city of Mariupol, waited calmly in a tent while Russian soldiers interrogated his mother.
The two had been taken prisoner after their port city came under prolonged attack by Russian forces in the spring of 2022. His mother, Snizhana Kozlova, was gone for 90 minutes. When the Russian guards brought her back, she hugged him wordlessly. Then social services officials arrived and took charge of him.
“We were crying, I couldn’t believe they were taking me away,” the boy, now 13, who goes by Sasha, recounted in an interview in the presence of his grandmother, Lyudmyla Siryk. His mother was detained and he has not seen or heard from her in the 20 months since.