10-year-old girl whose mother died abducted from Kostiantynivka and handed over to "uncle" in Russia

Russian forces deported 10-year-old Sofiia from Kostiantynivka after her mother was killed. The girl has now been placed in the care of an "uncle" whom she had never met before she was abducted. For a month, the Russian occupation authorities concealed the child's whereabouts before presenting a story about her "rescue".

Source: human rights activist Oleksandra Dvoretska

Details: Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's Commissioner for Children's Rights, who has been accused of involvement in the mass deportation of Ukrainian children, had previously spoken about Sofiia's removal from Kostiantynivka.

Lvova-Belova claimed that Russian soldiers had found the girl alone in a basement in Kostiantynivka, "looked after" her for a month and later "evacuated her to a safe place".

Sofiia reportedly said that her mother had been killed, that she did not remember her father, and that her grandmother and grandfather had died from injuries sustained in a drone strike. However, the Russians blamed the attacks on Ukrainian forces.

"At the beginning of July, Maria Lvova-Belova announced Sofiia's 'rescue' as though it had just happened. Yet by that point, the child had already been deep in Russian-occupied territory for at least a month. They held back the story until a convenient moment for propaganda purposes, linked to Russian claims about the 'capture' of Kostiantynivka. And that is how we learnt about yet another child in Russian hands.

Instead of informing the Ukrainian side of Sofiia's whereabouts and arranging for her return to her relatives in Ukraine, the girl was placed in a residential institution and information about her was concealed," Dvoretska said.

Since then, the occupation authorities have forced the child to appear in various videos. In them, the girl can be seen thanking Russian soldiers and saying that her relatives had supposedly been killed by the Ukrainian military.

"We established all the circumstances back in the summer. Sofia has close relatives in Ukraine who were looking for her, waiting for her and asking for her to be returned. But the Russians kept the child in a residential institution for months, with no possibility of returning to them," Dvoretska wrote.

Lvova-Belova recently said that Sofiia was being placed in the care of an "uncle" who lives in Russia with his wife.

The Russian official claimed that the child herself had expressed a desire to live with her "uncle". Dvoretska, however, says Sofiia had not known that this "relative" existed before she was abducted.

A video was subsequently posted on Lvova-Belova's Telegram channel showing the "uncle" and his wife collecting Sofiia. In the footage, the girl is wearing a camouflage cap bearing the Russian flag and the word "Spets" [short for "specialist" or "special forces"]. The "guardian's" face is blurred.

"The Russians suddenly remembered the child's privacy. In the new video, they carefully blurred the face of the uncle to whom Sofiia is being handed over, as well as those of the other adults. But this was not done to protect the child. It was done to make it difficult to establish who these people are and exactly who the Ukrainian child has been handed over to.

"When they needed to film propaganda, no one cared about the privacy or safety of 10-year-old Sofia. She was simply needed as a tool for propaganda," Oleksandra Dvoretska said.

Background: A Ukrainian girl with a disability who had been abducted by Russian forces from a residential institution in Oleshky was previously reported missing in Russia.

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