But she had turned 17 by the time she walked alone through fields, feeling scared, back into Ukrainian-controlled territory one evening almost a year later in August 2023.

That’s how Valeriia Sydorova became one of some 19,500 children taken by Russia in a war crime that saw the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague issue an international arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin in March last year.

Over 19,000 have yet to come home.

And speaking to EUobserver from Kyiv via an interpreter on Wednesday (13 March), Sydorova said her message to them was: “Ukraine doesn’t forget you. Every child’s being counted, every story is being recorded”.

“Ukraine is doing everything it can to bring you back and Ukraine is calling you back,” she said.

Sydorova, who was studying to be a paramedic and who hoped to be a doctor specialising in rehabilitation, also had a message for Putin.

“If I met him or if he read my interview, I would tell him this: ‘Every story of every deported Ukrainian child is being documented’. And I’d say: ‘You will take all the responsibility for destroying these childhoods’.”

For its part, the EU has also blacklisted 39 Russian officials on child-abduction grounds.

Related EU documents tell of Ukrainian children illegally adopted by Russian families, new passports with fake names, and children sent to propaganda and paramilitary-training camps.

Belgian foreign minister Hadja Lahbib, speaking on behalf of EU countries at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, also said Putin’s actions “remind us of the darkest days of the last century”, referring to Stalin-era deportations.

And Sydorova’s testimony shed light on how things happened on the ground.

Russians put her on one of 12 buses full of Nova Kakhovka’s children that morning in October 2022.

Putin had launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine seven months earlier on 22 February and Russian forces had seized her home town the same day.

By October, “we heard the war coming every day. We heard shelling and bombing,” Sydorova recalled.

The Russians said they were evacuating children for their own safety.

“Our buses were escorted by military police and Russian military all the way … we were told we’re going to a camp in Yevpatoriya [a town in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014] but nobody knew where, because nobody told us its name,” she said.

The buses took them to what looked like old holiday condominiums by the seaside.

There were about 500 children held at the camp, Sydorova estimated.

“Some were only five or six years old and there were other children older than me. The older children took care of their siblings,” she said.

“The conditions were really bad. It wasn’t a place meant for children. They gave us expired food to eat and there was no medical care,” she said.

“There was no school. I mean, we had maybe one class a day, and if it was a history lesson, they were telling us twisted facts about Ukraine,” Sydorova said.

Making contact

Morale remained high because everyone thought they’d be home soon.

But after two months, Sydorova began to feel “desperate”. “I felt like we’d been abandoned,” she said.

“Nobody had told my granny where they’d taken me. We were trying to call each other, but there was no connection, because the city [Nova Kakhovka] was being besieged. Then one day we somehow got a stable connection and she immediately identified where I was and said she was coming to get me the next day,” Sydorova said.

The camp freed Sydorova when her grandmother came and they went to live in Heniches’k, still in Russia-occupied Ukraine, where Sydorova enrolled in a school with a Russian curriculum.

But the teenager said she couldn’t stay there after what she’d been through.

“It’s a country of occupiers and terrorists — I realised there’s no future there for me,” she said.

And that’s how come she found herself walking with a large suitcase containing everything she owned through a military checkpoint back into Ukrainian-controlled territory last summer.

“Yes, I felt scared,” she said. “I felt scared, because at one point I suddenly realised that they [Russian guards] could deny me access to Ukraine and take me away to Russia and nobody would even know where I was,” Sydorova said.

Sydorova walked through two kilometres of fields into Ukrainian-held lands because there were no trains or buses running due to the war.

And she recalled the moment that she crossed the line in blissful terms.

Getting out

“It was a summer day in August. I can’t remember which day of the week it was, but there was an amazing sunset over Ukraine. I mean, there was even a new smell in the air,” she said. “I was smiling because I felt free,” she added.

She declined to speak of her grandmother’s whereabouts for “security reasons”.

And for her part, Belgium’s Lahbib reminded MEPs in Strasbourg that Sydorova was one of the lucky few.

“Since the start of the war, over 19,500 Ukrainian children have been forcibly deported and displaced from Ukraine to Russia, with only 388 children able to return home,” Lahbib said.

“We’ll do our best to bring back home as many children as we can,” the Belgian minister added, citing the work of joint EU-ICC investigation teams and databases.

EU commissioner Dubravka Šuica spoke of the children’s “terrible trauma” and their “need to regain a sense of normality”.

Even the usually pro-Russian Identity and Democracy group in the European Parliament voiced revulsion at Russia’s actions.

And when one fringe MEP defended Putin on Wednesday, Šuica showed emotion, saying: “Really horrible by the pro-Russian guy … disgusting”.