The most important phone call of Yevhen Mezhevyi’s life came in mid-June of 2022. His anxiety, fear and exhaustion at the time makes him fuzzy about the exact date. What he does remember is the sound of his son’s voice. Matvii was calling from Russia, where he and his two younger sisters had been forcibly deported nearly a month before — the same morning Mezhevyi, a single father and Ukrainian soldier from Mariupol, had been released without explanation after spending 45 days as a prisoner of war in a Russian penal colony in Donetsk oblast.

Before the war, Dima led a normal life as a teenager. He lived with his parents, spent time with friends or on his phone, and sometimes bickered with his sisters. Now, standing in a cemetery on the outskirts of his village, Dima stares at the brightly coloured wreaths that cover the freshly dug graves of his parents and paternal grandparents.

In Moldova, a disturbing case has emerged involving the attempted sale of a Ukrainian infant to a Romanian couple, highlighting the dark underbelly of illegal adoption rings.

Ukraine says more than 19,000 children have been illegally taken by Russia since the war began. NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with two teenagers who were abducted from Ukraine.

During the 14 months for which Veronika Vlasenko attended school in Russia, she was regularly told by teachers and fellow students that she would never be able to go home to Ukraine. “Every day they said to me that I would be staying here for ever and would never leave Russia,” she said. “They told me that Ukraine doesn’t exist, that it never existed, that we’re all Russians … At times the other kids would beat me for being pro-Ukrainian.”

Ukrainian officials have condemned a new decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in early 2024 simplifying the process of conferring Russian citizenship on Ukrainian children abducted from wartime Ukraine.

Ukraine has condemned a decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin making it possible to confer Russian citizenship on Ukrainian children moved to Russia. Last March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin over Russia's policy of forced child deportations. The Ukrainian foreign ministry called the decree illegal.

TALLINN, Estonia — Belarus' authoritarian president on Thursday attended a government-organized meeting with children brought from Russia-controlled areas of Ukraine, openly defying an international outrage over his country's involvement in Moscow's deportation of Ukrainian children.

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.

Anastasia was living in Zaporizhzhia and was pregnant with Dorothy and Charlie’s baby. Then Russia invaded and she knew she had to escape to save the child