More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a long operation to bring them back home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they had been taken from areas occupied by Russian forces during the war.
Mothers hugged sons and daughters as they crossed the border from Belarus into Ukraine on Friday after a complex rescue mission involving travel across four countries.
Dasha's mother Natalia said she had traveled from Ukraine to Crimea via Poland, Belarus and Moscow to get her daughters. Ukraine's Crimea peninsula has been occupied by Russia since 2014. "Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing its completion. It was special regarding the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity," said Mykola Kuleba, the founder of the Save Ukraine humanitarian organization that helped arrange the rescue mission.
The three said they had been separated from their parents who were pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for what was billed as two weeks, from occupied parts of Kherson and Kharkiv regions. The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's children's rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
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