War in Ukraine, the documents that put Putin’s ally in trouble: a kidnapped girl adopted

An important political ally of Vladimir Putin adopted a girl kidnapped from a Ukrainian orphanage. Sergey Mironov, the 70-year-old leader of the Fair Russia political party, is mentioned on the adoption certificate for a two-year-old girl who was taken in 2022 by a woman to whom the man is now married. The documents, discovered by Panorama BBC, show that the girl’s identity was later changed in Russia. The girl, originally named Margarita, was one of 48 people who disappeared from the Kherson regional orphanage when Russian forces took control of the city. He is among some 20,000 children the Ukrainian government says have been taken by Russian forces since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.

Earlier this year, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for the alleged illegal deportation of Ukrainian children to territory controlled by the Russia. The Russian government says it is not deporting Ukrainian children, but rather evacuating them to protect them from war.

The BBC worked with Ukrainian human rights investigator Victoria Novikova to find out what happened to Margarita and the other children. Novikova has prepared a dossier containing new evidence for the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, which she will hand over to the International Criminal Court. The mystery surrounding Margarita began when a woman showed up at the Kherson Children’s Hospital, where the 10-month-old was being treated for an attack of bronchitis in August 2022. Margarita was the youngest resident of the local orphanage, which cared for children who had health problems or whose parents lost custody or died. Margarita’s mother relinquished custody shortly after her birth and her father’s whereabouts were unknown. Dr Nataliya Lyutikova, who cared for the babies at the hospital, said she was a smiling little girl who loved hugging people. The woman introduced herself as “head of children’s affairs in Moscow,” Dr. Lyutikova recalls. Shortly after Kherson returned to Ukrainian control, Dr. Lyutikova said she received repeated phone calls from a Russian official at the orphanage demanding that Margarita be sent home immediately. Within a week, the girl was discharged from the hospital. One morning, they asked the orphanage staff to prepare her for a trip. “We were scared, everyone was scared,” said Lyubov Sayko, a nurse at the center, adding that some Russian men arrived to take the girl, some of them in military camouflage: “It feels like I’m in a movie. “