Fate of thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped by Russia hangs in the balance of talks

KYIV, Ukraine — Armed with machine guns, balaclava-clad Russian soldiers burst into 16-year-old Vladislav Rudenko’s home in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine and gave him half an hour to gather some things.“I was home alone.

KYIV, Ukraine — Armed with machine guns, balaclava-clad Russian soldiers burst into 16-year-old Vladislav Rudenko’s home in the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine and gave him half an hour to gather some things.

“I was home alone. I packed my things in a panic,” the teenager told NBC News, describing the morning in October 2022, eight months after Russian forces captured the city, when he said the soldiers forced him to get into a car and drove away “in an unknown direction.”

It was the start of an eight-month nightmare as the teenager became part of a systematic effort by Russia to relocate and re-educate thousands of children from Ukraine, in some cases forcibly adopting them while sending others to military training camps.

At a meeting with President Donald Trump and several European leaders at the White House last month, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy raised the issue of Ukraine’s "abducted children.” His comments came three days after Trump met with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska for talks on ending the war.

While little progress has been made toward a ceasefire since then, Mykola Kuleba, the founder of Save Ukraine, a leading nongovernmental organization supporting people trying to secure the return of their children from Russian, insisted world leaders’ “focus must remain on children, not just land.”