Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it has taken an estimated 20,000 Ukrainian children into Russian-held territory or Russia itself. Ukrainian officials have decried the mass transfer of children as “illegal deportations,” while Russia has insisted it is part of a humanitarian effort to protect the children.

Last March, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his children’s rights commissioner alleging the relocation of Ukrainian children was a war crime. International groups have accused Russia of trying to undermine the children’s Ukrainian identity. Fewer than 400 of these children have returned home, according to Ukrainian authorities, and more than 19,000 remain held by Russia.

Children of Ukraine, a new FRONTLINE documentary directed by Paul Kenyon and produced by Kenyon and Maxim Tucker, follows the stories of families trying to find their missing children and Ukrainian investigators collecting evidence of alleged abductions. It also features teenagers who escaped and say they were subjected to pro-Kremlin propaganda.

Kenyon spoke with FRONTLINE about the challenges of filming during a war, interviewing children who’ve lived through traumatic situations and what may happen to the thousands of children still being held by Russia.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Can you tell me why you chose to pursue this story about Ukrainian children being taken and held in Russian territory?

I’ve got a long history, journalistically, of going to Ukraine at moments of tension. I have contacts there and they had told me early on that, when the Russians took territory from eastern Ukraine, they would take children — often vulnerable children — from orphanages and schools. The Russians would say, we’re doing this because the children are on the front lines and we want to move them away. But when the Ukrainians retook that land, the parents who wanted to retrieve their children found it incredibly difficult to do so. Many of them still haven’t found their children today, and the Russians appear not to have done everything they can to ensure reunification of parents with their children.

What were the biggest challenges in reporting this story? How did you overcome them?

When you’re working somewhere like Ukraine, you can only spend a very limited amount of time on the ground. You have to stay some driving distance from the war’s front. Most of these stories were very close to the front.

There’s a curfew in all of the eastern area of Ukraine, so you have to wait for daylight to set off. Some of these villages that we visited would take four hours to reach from Kharkiv.

We had two vans with us because we had a lot of equipment. If the vans drive too closely together, it looks from the air, from a Russian drone, as though you are a military convoy. So you can’t drive very close to each other. You have to leave a few hundred meters between yourselves. Otherwise you may be targeted by drones. You’ve got to plot your route very carefully to keep as far back from Russian lines as possible. When you arrive at the filming location, your options are limited to the point that you have to leave and get back before the curfew begins. So the window for filming on the ground is very narrow. You have to be very well organized.

Everything is very fluid. There might be something that happens the night before where the people all have to flee their village. You have to make up a lot of plans on the road and just work very quickly.

What kind of precautions did you take while filming with children who lived through traumatic situations?

Circumstances are always different. If you’re interviewing children in a time of peace, you have their parents give you consent, and this is done in a formal way. Quite often children are not put in front of the camera, and you get the parents talking instead. In a war zone like Ukraine, a lot of these children either don’t have parents or they come from quite dysfunctional families because of the war, but you obviously have to get the consent of the guardian.

Most people wanted their children to be interviewed in Ukraine. Because my normal instinct is to speak to the parent or the guardian, when I said to Nadiya Dzinyk, “I’m really interested in how your niece and nephew feel,” she said, “Well, why don’t you speak to them?” I said, “They’re very young and I don’t want to upset them. I think it may be easier through you.” She said, “Absolutely not. Because it’s about them, they should speak for themselves.” She sat them down and said to them, “Paul is here to ask you some questions. Would you like to answer them? He wants to talk to you about this, this and this.” And she turned to me and said, “Yes, they want to be interviewed.”

It’s quite easy to just speak to adults and not ask the children their position, their recollections. But these were the children who lived it, so it’s their lived experience which was important. And the families all immediately said, “Of course, you should speak to my child. They’ve lived it.”

In the documentary, we see Anastasia (a teenager who was taken to a camp in Russian-held Crimea and returned to Ukraine seven months later) grow frustrated when her interview is interrupted by shelling. When they pause the conversation to seek shelter, she suggests the shelling is second nature to her. What did you observe about how living in conflict zones has impacted the children you encountered in Ukraine?

Whilst interviewing Anastasia, I was sitting in her backyard before the IPHR (International Partnership for Human Rights) got there. I would say every couple of minutes there was a loud thump, probably a kilometer or so away. She was completely oblivious. She didn’t even notice. She continued talking, uninterrupted and unconcerned by any of this. You’ve got to bear in mind that the Russians are still in control of parts of Kherson city, which is pretty close to where she lives, and she lives with that sound all day and all night. She’s just grown used to it. It’s an extraordinary and very tragic thing to see. The other children in the film as well, they were quite close to the front. They seemed so unconcerned. Artem was the same.

Serhiy was interesting because as we were interviewing him, there were sirens going off in the background. He lived in a small village quite close to the front, and you could hear thumps and explosions. But his family sat down and cooked us a barbecue with the sound of sirens in the background and explosions within a few kilometers.

As reported in the documentary, many of the children who return describe being exposed to Russian propaganda. Some of the teenagers recall how they opposed and even mocked the pro-Kremlin messages. Have you come across cases where the propaganda was successful?

I think there have been cases where it’s been successful, but we are obviously not going to be able to find those in the sense that if the propaganda has been successful, the children stay where they are. And the Russian authorities told us that many children decided to stay in Russian-held territory — like Anastasia’s sister. From the perspective of Ukraine, that would be evidence that the propaganda is working.

How has your reporting experience from Ukraine evolved over the past decade? Was anything different this time?

Reporting in Ukraine in 2014, there was no thought, realistically, then that the Russians would ever try and take the country. At the time, in those Russian-speaking areas down the furthest east of Ukraine, there were people who surprised me in 2014 because they were hostile to me as a Western reporter and very pro-Moscow. I wouldn’t state that they were in the majority, but there were people on the streets who would shout abuse at us in 2014.

Everybody we spoke to at the time on Ukraine’s eastern border spoke Russian, even if they didn’t support Russia. Now, in the space of two years since 2022, almost the entire country speaks Ukrainian. Ukrainian used to be seen as a sort of second rate language — it’s how the Russians tried to make the Ukrainian language appear. Now, everybody speaks Ukrainian — and it’s seen as a political statement to speak Russian. This came from the young people of Ukraine, who would say, “Why are you talking in the language of the oppressors?” to their parents, many of whom spoke Russian.

Ukraine used to feel like a very safe place to be. And now as soon as you get beyond Kyiv, traveling east, it’s a dangerous place to be in whichever city you’re in. There are power cuts, there are explosions, and there are empty cities. There were huge amounts of roaming dogs and cats whose owners could never take them when they left the country. And there are a lot of very elderly people who can’t move around, and a lot of people who can’t look after themselves and who need help in these big, devastated cities.

According to Ukrainian officials, there are still over 19,000 children being held illegally by Russia. What might the future look like for these children? How have rescue operations changed since earlier in the war?

I think it’s getting increasingly difficult for Save Ukraine or any other organizations to bring these children home. There used to be a lot of informal processes that the parents could go through to collect children, and now those are gradually being shut down.

For all those thousands of children who were still there, as some of the parents said to us, there’s a strong possibility that after six months or so they’ll be put into foster families. If the Russians are true to their words, if their parents are ever traced, then the Russians would still reunite them. But realistically, that seems unlikely given the number that we’re talking about — 19,000 still missing. And they don’t make it easy to track down where these children are.

The younger they are, the less likely they are ever to be retrieved. Some of them will have been maybe with a foster family now for a couple of years since the war began, and they will not remember their original family, particularly if they’re also undergoing what we might call propaganda.

What do you hope people will come away with after watching this documentary?

I hope that people will realize that the war is far from over and that wars take place on many different levels. We’re all used to seeing the horrific attacks by the Russian military, but there’s more to war than shelling and shooting and some of the tactics that are used by the Russian authorities actually penetrate the fabric of society.

Some people would say that the Russians’ intention since the start has been to undermine the Ukrainian ethnicity and their sense of statehood and identity — and the longer those 19,000 children remain missing, the more likely that seems to be the case.

---